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.
A blockchain can complement a decentralised network by introducing trust into such a network, where the individual members cannot be trusted. This makes it possible to accurately document actions and reward or punish them accordingly. If you take such a distributed CDN network as an example, a blockchain could help to directly reward the individual members according to their contributions instead of building everything on voluntariness and goodwill as in the Tor network.