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.
If you don’t know what a content delivery network is, here : https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/
A CND is very costly to run in an effective way. And because it is an intermediary server between the user and content server, the market is already pretty full. So competing with the CDN giants is practically impossible in a decentralised manner.
Because of what a CDN does (cache website elements closer to the user, protect the website against ddos…), it cannot be a cheap weak server, or it’s the one which will get overwhelmed by the ddos, or even the users.
Another limiting factor is that in decentralisation, that means different companies, and so many separate plans to pay, which is just impossible for a company.
If it was decentralized, a company would have to go and pay 100 different companies (which is more expensive, du to the server costs and each companies having their own staff to may (even if it’s just 1 person per company)) just to offer a quick access to the users around the world, which is just impossible.
A CDN isn’t a great comparison to DDOS mitigations. CDN spreads the load amongst multiple locations that are distinct entities. Any one can be down and the rest functions fine. They generally exist on separate domains and are not inherently codependent.
DDOS requires an inline solution. A layer acting as a man in the middle to deflect or absorb the traffic destined to Lemmy.world, for example. That’s not something that can be readily be decentralized while there’s only one ingress to Lemmy.world.
I know well what a CDN is and that’s why I don’t understand why you build a DISTRIBUTED content delivery network on a single corporation. I mean, the whole architecture is based on decentralised servers that precache the content and share the service load. Why not create an independent network that provides this bandwidth and where each node is rewarded according to its contribution? I know blockchain is a term that pisses a lot of people off, but it’s basically the best way to incorporate trust and monetisation into a decentralised system.
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