this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Programming

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Could a malicious user bring down small lemmy instances by over-subscribing? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by Gerald@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@beehaw.org
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I just read how the federation works, but I'm worried about a growing pain. Say I was a malicious user, could I bring down a smaller Lemmy instance by subscribing to as many communities as possible? Or maybe even subscribing to a malicuous Lemmy instance that keeps spamming thousands of posts every second?

Couldn't that easily fill up a server's storage and effectively bring a server down? I guess you could block the malicious Lemmy instance (although wouldn't it be easy to create another?) and ban a user that subscribes to too many instances, however, it feels to me like a very hard problem to solve

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[–] deedasmi@lemmy.timdn.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'd put money that a large number of Lemmy instances are hosted on low end hardware that people have laying around. The bigger ones are dedicated hardware or cloud instances, but also the default rate limits are pretty high. As another user said, it would be trivial even before considering actual storage limits