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 decrypts to do the ddos protection, then reencrypts to the server.
If you are worried about security, cloudflare is provably more secure than any lemmy server.
But it still is a really bad idea to route big parts of the internet through one proprietary system. There have to be other ways to solve this.
Not if you want to provide a website accessible through modern web browsers.
If you want stable and distributed resources you need tech like bittorrent which survived everything the entertainment industry had to throw at it.
If you want a website, you need cloudflare.