this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Damn first vlemmy.net (my original instance) dies, and now one of the largest is hacked…
Yea, bad timing it seems, especially as lemmy just got on top of its scaling issues.
They seem to be unrelated. The vlemmy story is mysterious, unless something new came out, but either their home server died or they got scared of whatever bad/illegal stuff landed on their home server and just wiped it all and walked away. A bad story that shouldn’t happen, but, if true, a bad admin that we are probably better off without unless they do things somewhat better.
The lemmy.world story seems to be that an admin had their credentials hacked. Not good but also somewhat ordinary. Hopefully they just need some better security practices. There are questions around how much lemmy the software contributed to this hack and how much it can prevent a rogue admin from causing damage. I’d bet that there are improvements to be made but that in the end any admin of anything is a vulnerable point of attack. This may just be an individual’s bad luck or bad practices.
For me, it highlights the issues with having relatively centralised instances like lemmy.world. One admin gets hacked and a quarter of lemmy is under their control!
The real issue IMO is that recent events have pretty much proven that both big instances and small instances are problematic for different reasons.
Which small instances caused a problem?
vlemmy
Oh. Well that one just disappeared, which is something that will happen a lot.