• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle




  • While I understand everyone’s belief that the admin, @[email protected], abandoned the instance, I do not believe so for a few key reasons:

    1. They asked for additional admins no less than 24h before the first connection issues. This indicates their willingness to put in work for the instance and expand.
    2. They raised a legal issue with having to defederate from an instance just a few hours prior to the connection issues. The instance in question was hosting content that can be seen as child pornography in Irish law - which is where vlemm.net is hosted. @[email protected] was incredibly transparent with this issue. This level of transparency makes me doubt they would suddenly disappear purposefully. Speculatively I can guess that the legal issues may be connected to the going-dark.
    3. The site is still occasionally loading, but extremely slow and not correctly. In addition to this, it shows a logged in user (PrinceHabib72) - which is not me. There was a known security vulnerability in lemmy (see here ). The vulnerability includes cookie / token immitation and stealing. Having a logged in user (that is not me) when loading the site thus rings alarm bells to me. Apart from the logged in user, the inability to properly load the site most times but sometimes parts of it load (and the remaining requests time out, like getting icons and content etc.), screams denial-of-service to me.

    Just like the other people in this thread, these are speculations. However, I have a weird feeling in screaming ‘abandon’ here. Given everything observed, that does not feel right to me.