I read that they “defederated”… What does this mean? And why did they do this? And what are the consequences?

  • KelsonV@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Another way to look at it is that they suffered a DOS attack (in the form of more trolling than they could handle with their current staff), so they blocked the source. It sucks that some of it was coming from our instance.

    Not everyone has the same level of resources available to deal with the same problems.

    • PriorProject@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Another way to look at it is that they suffered a DOS attack

      Extending this analogy to a global scale, their response would be similar to Google shutting off search in the southern hemisphere because they were getting ddos’ed by a few thousand hosts in South America. The response is not effective because attackers can move to other geographies or proportional because many users unrelated to the attack impacted.

      These properties, lack of efficacy and lack of proportionality make their response a poor one, even if they think it’s the best they’re capable of. I also do not believe it’s the best response they’re capable of. The favor this particular response because in a world of tradeoffs they greatly value the culture within their instance, and care very little for the health of the fediverse beyond its walls. This is a choice, not a hard constraint.

      Not everyone has the same level of resources available to deal with the same problems.

      That’s certainly true. Also not everyone has to host an instance with double-digit percentage of the lemmyverse active userbase and communities. If one DOES choose to do that, doing it badly can negatively impact others, and they can speak out about those impacts.