Spyke

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Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked

First - really good summary and sounds like everyone is working hard.

Cross posting the below comment.

Under GDPR if you have had a data breach you have a legal obligation to assess whether you need to report it and you must make the report within 72 hours of discovering the breach.

There are other types of reportable breaches too, I only mention data as it sounds most likely. You may or may not be subject to PECR which may also have been breached although less likely. I don’t really have enough familiarity with the regulation to discuss that one.

If you are not sure if there has been a breach you may also need to discuss it with the relevant body or make a report.

Please can you update what action you have taken regarding this and if the incident was reportable or not and the reasons why. Edit - from that new information, it sounds like this is a reportable breach.

For a full understanding, it would be good to know if you had 2FA enabled on the compromised account particularly as it had admin privileges and if so how 2FA was circumvented with this exploit.

It would also be good to know what measures you have in place to prevent the same or other malicious attempts on your Open Collective and Patreon accounts as issues with those are potentially more serious. They may not be vulnerable to this, but it is going to be reassuring to know there is good security practice, 2FA protection etc enabled and you have robust procedures in place.

general

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We've grown an absolute shit ton of people the past day, insanely nuts to see how active World is.

Really interested to hear about the plans and costs to scale up and grow in a stable, reliable, and safe way. Hopefully Patreon membership grows too and allows continued performance improvements.

I think for more casual users, continued degraded performance - or worse, an instance being stopped for whatever reason and the content and accounts being lost - would probably stop the platform being a true replacement. Casual users would head back to Reddit.

I think having a public roadmap and backlog, good communication and transparency will be super important, particularly in these early stages.

Great job so far, this kind of sudden growth is not easy to manage!

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Lemmy.world grew by about 40% on the first day of reddit migration

This is beautiful to see - I understand Reddit is a company that needs to make a profit, but the way they have treated their users and unpaid staff is shocking (but not unexpected). The fact it also heavily impacts users with additional accessibility requirements is terrible.

Will be fun in a way to watch Reddit try to claw back what has happened.

Give it 12 months it will likely be a wreck along with the current CEO who will probably be given the boot.

I'm old enough to have seen many services go through this: AOL, MSN, MySpace, Fark, Slashdot, Digg, Something Awful, etc. Reddit (and maybe Twitter) are just next in line to realise they are not too big to fail. Hopefully followed by Meta.

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Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?

I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.

The things that spring to mind for me are:

  • Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.

  • Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.

  • Back-end build and scaling.

  • Duplicate communities across instances.

  • Account migration between instances.

  • Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.

  • GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.

  • Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.

  • How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.

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What was "The Incident" at work that caused an exodus in the work force?

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Oh my, if you insist.

It was a grey and damp October when The Incident occurred. At first, some people thought it was an accident - but then it happened again. The first was a mystery, the second an enigma. Both were massive shits that no human could possibly have left - or so we thought.

These colossal beasts were sometimes in the toilet, but sometimes hanging over the edge - trying to escape like a big slug or angry brown whale.

It kept happening, mystery upon mystery. And yet no one observed the source. How could this be?

Soon, these things were not just on or in the toilet, but on the cubical walls and in the sink. They were advancing and threatening to break out of the bathrooms and into the corridors - or who knows where. Would you turn in your chair and see one right next to you when you least expect it?

October turned into November, and then December and with various notices pinned up and emails and whispers and gossip, the poos seemed finally to have gone back from whence they came (or at least, stopped happening).

Then, in December just before Christmas, an awful present was left. It could not have been Santa, although it was definitely from someone who had eaten the world's supply of mince pies relatively recently. The massive shite was so big it blocked the plumbing and the office had no working toilets at all. There was an exodus of people, leaving early for the day - with that giant turd, Christmas had come early.

Every December I look back on those events and the unexpected gift, and wonder if the magic of Christmas will ever happen again.