Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these 'attacks' are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN.
Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
The big main lemmy servers can and do go down regularly. having accounts on other instances still gives me the ability to log in and participate on the communities I care about. I sure do wish the underlying federation logic allowed for associating selected logins on various instances together somehow.
Testing: often, I will create a post or comment into a community hosted on a different lemmy server and not see it update. When this happens, I'll log in on the other instance to see what that post or comment looks like from there.
Insurance against defederation: I participated/followed some beehaw.org communities before they defederated, and then I was forced to open an account there to continue participating in those communities.
Well, I can’t answer for them but this situation in particular makes it nice to have accounts on different instances. If I can’t log on to/load my lemmy.world account then I can switch to my lemm.ee account and load content there.
I have accounts on both lemmy.world and outpost.zeuslink.net. I have had a lot of problems with seeing posts from the smaller instance, while lemmy.world has been overloaded due to the massive Reddit exodus and script kiddies.
I created the account on the smaller instance first, but I'm still having a ton of issues with federation on that one (many communities still come up blank there, while lemmy.world has enough users that I can see everything when it isn't down).
So far federation seems to be a lot better since the fix from last week - I can't say that I've seen anything out of place or out of sync myself, but I am trying to keep a vigilant eye out for anything that's been overlooked!