UPDATE: @SDF@lemmy.sdf.org has responded

It is temporary as lemmy.world was cascading duplicates at us and the only way to keep the site up reliably was to temporarily drop them. We’re in the process of adding more hardware to increase RAM, CPU cores and disk space. Once that new hardware is in place we can try turning on the firehose. Until then, please patient.


ORIGINAL POST:

Starting sometime yesterday afternoon it looks like our instance started blocking lemmy.world: https://lemmy.sdf.org/instances

A screenshot of the page at https://lemmy.sdf.org/instances showing the lemmy.world instance on the blocklist

This is kind of a big deal, because 1/3rd of all active users originate there! A pie chart depicting the top instances by usershare. The lemmy.world instance is in the top spot with 1/3 of the total usershare

Was this decision intentional? If so, could we get some clarification about it? @SDF@lemmy.sdf.org

  • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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    1 year ago

    It is temporary as lemmy.world was cascading duplicates at us and the only way to keep the site up reliably was to temporarily drop them. We’re in the process of adding more hardware to increase RAM, CPU cores and disk space. Once that new hardware is in place we can try turning on the firehose. Until then, please patient.

  • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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    1 year ago

    live updates in progress. Moved to SSDs, added more cores and 128GB and 64GB ram.

  • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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    1 year ago

    Here is where we’re at now.

    • increased cores and memory, hopefully we never touch swap again
    • dedicated server for pict-rs with its own RAID
    • dedicated server for lemmy, postgresql with its own RAID
    • lemmy-ui and nginx run on both to handle ui requests

    Thank you for everyone who stuck around and helped out, it is appreciated. We’re working on additional suggested tweaks from the Lemmy community and hope to let lemmy.world try to DoS us again soon. Hopefully we’ll do much better this time.

    • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      Killer stuff! Sorry for my contributing undue pressure on top of what was probably already a taxing procedure happening in the server room.

      Out of curiousity: how do you feel about Lemmy performance so far? I’m actually a little bit surprised that we already managed to outstrip the prior configuration. I suppose that inter-instance ActivityPub traffic just punches really hard regardless of intra-instance activity?

    • estee@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      What can we (ordinary users) do to help? I’m in Europe, would it be better if I used the SDFeu server as my home instance?

      • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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        1 year ago

        Yes, the fediverse wants to be decentralized, so it is encouraged to use what works best for you. lemmy.sdfeu.org is located in Düsseldorf, Germany.

  • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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    1 year ago

    Two things that would be great:

    • Have a tanoy/horn announce icon at the top like with Mastodon where status information can be posted.
    • Change the heart icon to link to a method that supports the local instance

    Attempts were made to create a thread for the almost daily upgrades we’re going through with BE and UI changes, but even with pinning it doesn’t have the visibility.

    We’re on site in about 1 hour to install a new RAID and once that is completed we’ll finish the transfer of pict-rs data.

  • sidhant@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    If this is true I will be making another account and moving to a different server. The only reason I joined this one was that it doesn’t seem to block/defed.

    • SDF@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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      1 year ago

      You’re absolutely welcome to do that as it is your decision and you have many choices. We hope to build a community of folks that would like to help the fediverse grow and support smaller instances. Similar growing pains were seen during the twitter exodous last September.

    • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      As someone working on integrations I’d also have to leave if we’re permanently blocking the largest instance, but I’d like to give SDF the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe this was just a temporary measure to deal with the insane load from yesterday?

        • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          1 year ago

          I’d really rather not leave, though! I like it here – but being forced to choose does put me in a bind when it comes to being able to build the things that I want to build. Lucky for me then that today won’t be the day where such a decision is thrust upon me.

        • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know if geoblocking is a thing, but just FYI: there are additional Lemmy SDF instances for EU & JP regions which may work better depending on where you’re based.

          • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Ah, seems like blacklisted IP. Since I am behind CG-NAT the public IP is simultaneously shared between many users. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting to the network which changed my public IP, and it works now.

            We really need the IPv6.

        • webb@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I noticed that with Mullvad it’s also doing that, I think it might be an anti-spam system?

  • webb@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    This is a good thing. We don’t want another mastodon.social situation.

      • webb@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s an absolutely massive instance that’s a net negative for the Fediverse. It completely defeats the purpose of federation. The Mastodon devs used to drive people to smaller instances but decided they wanted to be /the/ instance. They made themselves a default in the app. At around the same time other instances started getting a crap ton of spam from them that ate up a bunch of moderator’s time on smaller instances. The Fediverse only works in regards to moderation because there is less users per admin, but mastodon.social doesn’t have that advantage. A bunch of people defederated from them as a result which was a good thing for the instances that did it. They failed pretty hard at communicating during this time as well.

        Having one instance hold a large part of the network is bad for everybody involved. Defederating from monoliths is a healthy thing for networks to do. Building your own web beats any algorithm, can’t do that if you’re already federating with 99% of people.

      • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s the biggest instance by far, to the point of being virtually non-viable to defederate from. If they ever sell out or make decisions other instances don’t like, tough cookies.