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Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

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Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#101

Post by anonymousab »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

The prevalent discourse/attempt-at-a-meme-but-people-are-taking-it-seriously saying "Bluesky is down because of AI vibecoding!" is starting to get annoying and unoriginal. Even when Bluesky confirmed it's a DDoS, the line is now "maybe they wouldn't have gotten DDoSed if they didn't vibecode and their code was better."

It turns out that this was, in fact, the case. They DDOS'd themselves, with a deployment of their own code - something they have separately claimed is "99% AI written" these days.

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#102

Post by minimaxir »

anonymousab wrote: post #101
minimaxir wrote: post #2

The prevalent discourse/attempt-at-a-meme-but-people-are-taking-it-seriously saying "Bluesky is down because of AI vibecoding!" is starting to get annoying and unoriginal. Even when Bluesky confirmed it's a DDoS, the line is now "maybe they wouldn't have gotten DDoSed if they didn't vibecode and their code was better."

It turns out that this was, in fact, the case. They DDOS'd themselves, with a deployment of their own code - something they have separately claimed is "99% AI written" these days.

Source? Bluesky has not published a RCA yet and they said the would on April 20: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3mjprnr5ptk2m

There is apparently a blog post going around but I am blocked by the person who posted it. I would still wait for the RCA. (EDIT: this is the blog post, it's about an outage a week ago, and does not mention AI: https://pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/april-2026-outage-post-mortem-2... )

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#103

Post by ivann »

OuterVale wrote: post #14

The interface seemed to function as normal, but specifically the API was targeted, which left a lot of confused users who were seeing the interface peppered with errors. Watching as it unfolded, it seems it affected certain regions to begin with and then slowly spread worldwide. Seems they might have failed to host the status page ( https://status.bsky.app ) separately as well, because that went down several times th…

The group that claim to be doing the DDoS also claim to be DDoSing the status page specifically.

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#104

Post by eukara »

yangm97 wrote: post #99
eukara wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

historic posts from the known network and (sometimes media, instance setting) are cached on your own instance in ActivityPub. interactions travel across the known network graph. if an instance vanished forever, overnight, there is at least an imprint of it across the network, albeit instance specific. that may be by design, there are jurisdictions that have people complying with laws and things. not sure how the ecos…

That doesn’t answer the point I’m making. If the instance your account was made on explodes, YOU lose your social graph, wether some of your posts survive cached elsewhere is not relevant, your account is gone, and so are your connections. You have no way to prove an account made after the original instance went down belongs to someone, that’s the issue with federated systems. As for content moderation, in nostr rela…

the web, which also gets referred to as decentralized, suffers from the same proof problem. we have identity tied largely to dns. web sites can claim whatever. somewhere a line was drawn to indicate what matters most is creating something without a single point of failure?

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#105

Post by shafyy »

rimunroe wrote: post #81
direwolf20 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick. It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference imple…

> Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice.

Hard disagree. Email is very much decentralized. Doesn't mean that there's still a long tail distrubtion, but its not like 99.999% of email accounts are on Gmail. And I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#106

Post by rimunroe »

shafyy wrote: post #105
rimunroe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick. It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference imple…

> Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. Hard disagree. Email is very much decentralized. Doesn't mean that there's still a long tail distrubtion, but its not like 99.999% of email accounts are on Gmail. And I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

> Email is very much decentralized.

It looks like about 97% of people use iCloud, Gmail, or Outlook as their provider. That doesn't feel like it's terribly different. The people not using one of those big three make up a comparable percent of the total as the number of Bluesky users using alternative PDSes.

Three providers vs one provider does feel very different if those are the only option, but that's not the case for email or Bluesky/AT proto.

> I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

You can also set up an account on a different PDS and/or use a different app view quite trivially too so I'm not sure that's substantially different.

Re: Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

#107

Post by evbogue »

rimunroe wrote: post #93
evbogue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATProto would need to use signing key cryptography and content addressable storage to be distributed. If we can't store our data with third parties or create an offline-first system then it's not a decentralized social network.

ATproto does support storing data elsewhere. That’s what a PDS does. I’m not sure what you mean by an offline-first system in this context though or why it’s required for decentralization. Could you elaborate?

Yes, and it only supports storing one's data in one place. If we use local-first as our measuring stick for a decentralized system then ATProto fails since we can't store the msgs anywhere -- such as on the nodes of my friends. Prior art such as secure-scuttlebot had this figured out, and thus no one ever complained about ssb being centralized.
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