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Who or what exactly might be conducting the current DDOS attack against PieFed.Social?
(media.piefed.social)
EDIT: TBC, here's the current message seen when refreshing a PF stream:
"Piefed.social is having a denial of service attack. They are being kept at bay for now but could return with a more effective method. Download your community subscriptions so if you need to move to another server it’ll be painless - with a few clicks you’ll be seeing all the same content as before. See list of alternate servers at here or here."
Possible causes?
- Fellow instance that got PO'd somehow? (seems like a major stretch)
- Just random hackers havin' fun?
- Reddit or similar, targeting one of the top growing instance softwares in ActivityPub / FV? EDIT2 : the timing certainly seems to fit for the recent influx of users coming from Reddit. (see comments)
- Some right-wing entity, not happy about the general rational / left bias to the instance?
- Other..?
In any case, much thanks to our instance runner and dev for fending off the first wave(!) Hope everything is backed up and possible to be restored if the worst happens.
(seriously, what a shitty way to be repaid for doing a great, ongoing job for the community and FOSS)
Is it really a DDOS or piefied just unable to handle an influx of users? Does piefed scale horizontally? Is it async? Does it spawn a thread per request or does it work from a thread/process pool?
Without having looked at the code, my suspicion would be rather that it can't handle thousands of users concurrently and just 20k users trying to use it at the same time looks like DDOS. Piefed is probably nowhere near v1 or has never been tested for performance.
I'd much rather see some evidence for a DDOS e.g a graph showing number of connections to the server, a graph of response time, number of database connections, of something. Just saying "DDOS" when it might just be the software struggling to keep up with legitimate users seems questionable.
P.S this isn't a slight at the piefed devs - performance is usually the last thing on someone's mind who just wants to ship things quickly. Especially with such a demanding and uneducated public that doesn't understand these are unpaid individuals contributing, not paid workers working on the code 9-5, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.
Piefed.social was busier specifically 2-3 days ago and this did not happen.
Definitely not normal traffic.