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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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bluesky app view is centralized in that it can decide which content to show, but A) the hosting of that content is decentralized, and B) alternate app views like Blacksky exist which are fully independent of Bluesky (both Bluesky the company and Bluesky the app view). The Bluesky app view could stop showing users content from Blacksky (or any other) PDSes, but that's it. If you're using the Blacksky app view, afa…

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 implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution.

Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%.

> They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239

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

#82

It seems like DDoS's are getting harder and harder to deal with. The tips that worked 10 years ago are now easily worked around. I keep seeing people on here say "just use TLS fingerprinting" like it's a panacea, but I can't remember the last time an attack didn't spoof their fingerprint. It feels like, outside of custom behavior tracking, there's no good way to truly protect your site without making it more restrict…

Client side challenges would be fine when a DDoS is actually happening, but they're basically targeting certain platforms more than others right now. Not actually helping in keeping a site secure in that case and hurting user experience.

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

#83
post #27

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."

Perhaps underestimating how much the bsky audience absolutely hate AI. It's funny how closely bsky has replicated the dynamic of old Twitter where the people who run it and the people who use it have completely different priorities and loathe each other.

Maybe I’m in a very atypical corner of Bluesky, but I can’t say I’ve seen more than average anti-AI sentiment.

Also worth considering that there is a lot of anti-AI sentiment outside of our bubble! Maybe not a majority, but the minority is very vocal.

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

#84
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why would anyone blindly criticize AI tools, when there are so many flaws to see?

Because that would take a minimum amount of effort, nuance, and reasoning, and the result would probably generate less interactions compared to a cheap shot based on vibes.

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

#87
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and other hosts are working normally.

I'm pretty sure the only one that stayed up at all was Red Dwarf, the rest all rely on at least some part of the "main" instance and weren't up

It sounds like Blacksky's outage was much more limited and was caused by them missing some spots where their code still accidentally had some Bluesky integration due to it being the default: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mjnf6pubr...

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

#88

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."

> 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." The context of the "jokes", regardless of if one finds them funny, is that this is exactly how AI boosters (including the bluesky team) have been behaving. Every little benefit, no matter how small or unfounded, was being attributed to AI usage. So people do the opposi…

Do you have an example?

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week or two ago, when there was a Bluesky outage and a Claude outage at the same time, people were earnestly pointing to that as evidence that Claude was somehow a load-bearing component of Bluesky, or that AI vibecoding had caused the outage... I had to just disengage but I was also very annoyed by it all.

[flagged]

I don't think they're idiots, or blindly criticizing; but I do think there's a kind of kneejerk reaction spurred by (legitimate, understandable) anti-AI sentiment, plus the fact that most people have absolutely no clue how cloud hosting, infrastructure, or software development in general works. The frustrating part to me is when people who don't know much about a topic try to make big, sweeping statements about it!

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

#90

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."

A week or two ago, when there was a Bluesky outage and a Claude outage at the same time, people were earnestly pointing to that as evidence that Claude was somehow a load-bearing component of Bluesky, or that AI vibecoding had caused the outage... I had to just disengage but I was also very annoyed by it all.

people really do struggle to differentiate between correlation and causation. we humans love our patterns so that we can make sense of existence.
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