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exploding-heads.com have recently announced their intention to move to [Nostr](https://nostr.com/). Their plan is to leave Lemmy behind entirely, with exploding-heads.com poised to go offline on August 31st 2023. Original announcement: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290 Lemdit link: https://lemdit.com/post/735021 According to their admin: >I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger. >Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr: >- it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers >- it makes censorship very difficult >- it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly. >As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are >- petty tyrants, or >- benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment) >I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative. Some users are questioning the transition to a micro-blogging-style platform like Nostr and the effect this will have on existing Lemmy communities. --- ### About exploding-heads.com exploding-heads.com is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with ~7.4k registered users. They are a right-leaning instance which is centered around free speech: >Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable >We are a fun loving community of free people tired of propaganda fed to us government, media, big tech, crony capitalists, and self anointed elites. exploding-heads.com has received a largely hostile reception from other large Lemmy instances, many of which have chosen to defederate from them.
hexbear.net is `"A leftist social platform centered around community building through discussion, shitposting memes, and sharing content."` They are fairly large:  hexbear.net were not a federated instance until recently, when [they announced their intent to start federating](https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770) with a select group of other Lemmy servers. lemmy.world claimed to see ulterior motives behind this intention and [decided to pre-emptively block hexbear.net](https://lemdit.com/post/336778) from being able to federate with them. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the largest Lemmy instance thinks it has a duty to protect its users against anything that might cause upset, sometimes before it even happens.
lemmy.one has been down for a while now. I've personally noticed that it hasn't been working for over 24 hours, some comments suggest it may be longer than that:  lemmy.one is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with around [7.3k users](https://the-federation.info/node/details/49982). The site does load, however it displays a Lemmy error. This shows that the Lemmy UI is still there and working, but the Lemmy back-end server process is not. Based on this, it doesn't look similar to the [disappearance of vlemmy.net](https://lemdit.com/post/38958) and it's most likely just a technical issue. #### So what is going on? My guess is there are 3 likely scenarios for what went wrong: - The Lemmy server process crashed (it's known to happen from time to time) - This is an update gone wrong (the latest Lemmy update in particular is tricky as it requires a DB migration). - Some other mysterious event messed up the DB This is a very long time to be struggling with a technical issue and the lack of communication is concerning. It could be that: - The admin is just not available to deal with it right now due to real life reasons. - The DB is now a mess and the Lemmy server process can't be restarted. I expect they have regular DB back-ups like everyone else and would've rolled back to a previous snapshot by now. I think the most likely scenario is that the admin just isn't available to deal with it. To fix this requires actual server access, so even though lemmy.one had several Lemmy admins, it's unlikely that all of them have the required access to deal with this issue. It would be interesting to hear if anyone managed to get in touch with lemmy.one's admin. Edit: It's back: https://lemdit.com/post/294679
>This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations. > >The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load. > >In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult. > >Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements. Full release notes can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md
I've noticed that traffic from join-lemmy.org dropped off entirely for the past couple of days - it was patchy for a while before that. It looks like our instance has disappeared from the list, along with others such as lemmy.nz I'm guessing there are probably more servers missing, but I don't know about them to be able to confirm. What I do know is this has nothing to do with our [uptime](https://status.lemdit.com/) and I can see the join-lemmy.org crawler touching base successfully every hour. I've submitted a [bug report](https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/228) for it. join-lemmy.org is an important part of the Lemmy ecosystem so I do hope this gets identified and resolved. In the meantime we're a very well kept secret.
[lemmy.blahaj.zone has defederated from lemmynsfw.com](https://lemdit.com/post/162571) after discovering a community which they believed had CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). They demanded that the community and its members be purged, which [lemmynsfw.com refused stating that they couldn't find any evidence of CSAM.](https://lemdit.com/post/162653) Both sides think they're in the right on this one and I expect more instances will want to react one way or the other.
It has been another eventful week. #### [InfinityFree announced that all .ml domains are being returned to the government of Mali](https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-ml-domains-are-down-due-to-registry-transfer/79379) What does this have to do with Lemmy, you ask? Plenty: - lemmy.ml - lemmygrad.ml - lemmy.fmhy.ml As of writing this, lemmy.fmhy.ml is down and it's unclear what will happen to lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. [lemmy.fmhy.ml have announced that user data is safe](https://lemdit.com/post/143054), though changing domain names is a huge pain for re-federation and nobody really knows how that will work yet. If you are unable to access communities that used to reside on lemmy.fmhy.ml - this is why. In general, it's a good idea to stay away from country specific TLDs when hosting an instance, epecially if you don't reside in those countries. #### [lemmy.world and other instances are suffering through continued DoS attacks](https://lemdit.com/post/154993) This one unfortunately comes with the territory once you reach a certain size. If you've been struggling to reach lemmy.world recently, this is probably why. #### [Part of the problem is it's possible to overwhelm the Lemmy server through certain user actions, such as account deletion](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3697) Fixing this kind of issue will lead to massive performance benefits for large instances and improve resilience. Related: - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3165 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3649 --- What did I miss?