Part of the issues in the past have been caused by one singular user who, during the first couple of weeks of growth, registered absurd amounts of communities to try and become an immediate power moderator. He was banned, got really angry, and have been creating spam accounts, tried to use the CSS attack during the emoji issue, and you know what, I wouldn't be surprised if he's the one trying to DDoS the site.
Was it someone with Turtle something in their handle? I can’t remember his/her whole name but they freaked out a few weeks ago when they got banned on Reddit after being a power mod that enjoyed being a jerk and they showed up here in Lemmy for a day or two.
The only DDoS that I can half-way tolerate is ones that go against corporations/governments that do evil shit. And even then, those attacks had better not effect people's health and welfare needs. Yes, assholes abound.
Hopefully this crap is contributing to Lemmy overall being stronger. If the developers can plug the holes in the overall architecture so systemic vulnerabilities are minimal, and people make accounts on multiple instances and just switch when one is down, it might take the "fun" out of taking an instance down.
DDOS is a pretty brute-force attack, so it isn't typically relying on a vulnerability per se. Pretty much the only way to mitigate it is to have large enough infrastructure that you can detect and filter out its gobs of spammy traffic, which no Lemmy instances (at least at the moment) can really practically have. They could potentially use a service like CloudFlare, which does have that infrastructure in place, but that can be expensive. I'd imagine CloudFlare (or a competitor) is probably the best solution they can go with, at least in the short-term.
Yeah, for this one I was meaning the alternate account part. But this one is just the latest in a string, most of which were vulnerabilities or flaws in the architecture. I could have been more clear though.
Minimal. It frankly just doesn't actually advance his goals very significantly. Nor is he a particularly clever man that thinks of unusual strategies.
I think his focus is on squeezing his current userbase more than any kind of long term caring about the size of it. Wouldn't be surprised if he plans to quit his job in the next 5 years and collect a fat severance anyway. He'd rather people not leave, but DDoSing a small chunk of people somewhere else doesn't really help much.
This is a random attack, so ask yourself who benefits? For one thing, it's fun. It also pisses some people off. It also irritates a fairly politically active population.
Who wants all those things? Trolls, of course. Why are they, specifically, trolling? Varies individual to individual, but mainly it's about causing pain to others.
Some of the larger subreddits probably have more traffic than all of lemmy. I don't think he's spending his time trying to figure out how to sabotage lemmy.