It grew too big too fast and became the “one instance to rule them all” that Lemmy was never designed to be. It can’t handle the amount of content it’s being asked to.

This is a common misconception. Lemmy.world has both the hardware and admin expertise necessary to manage the load.

They made a post about a few hours ago in which they wrote:

This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.

The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they’ll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very ‘expensive’ sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.

So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That’s one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.