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.
Cloudflare isn’t bad per se, but having huge amounts of the public internet behind a centralized provider is bad for the flexibility and resiliency of the internet as a whole.
Maybe one day we’ll work out a distributed version. The upside is, they’re a filter, not the actual site. If we work out better long term strats they’re disposable. If they’re worse than not having them at any point, it’s just a dns change to kick em to the curb