We've been targeted too by what's probably a couple of script kiddies trying to brute force their way into our server. Not exactly a DDOS but a similar effect. Just had to remodulate the shields a few times.
Stories like this make me very happy to hear. When I heard the /r/StarTrek and Daystrom mods talking about joining Lemmy I'd thought bringing their reputation for positivity and tolerance to a Trek-themed instance could provide a familiar and comfortable jumping-off point for users unsure about the broader Fediverse.
OH, yes. vger.app is a web app (aka forntend), not a theme. It's also not "Voyager" (the show) themed per-se, I believe it's based off of the old Reddit app Apollo.
I banned the account from the instance and alerted its instance Admin. Lemmy makes it very easy for bot accounts to self-identify and this one wasn't which makes it more suspicious. But what is its goal? Karma farming??
True, but if Meta (or anyone) wanted to "directly" get that data, it would be as trivial as setting up an instance on something as small as a Raspberry Pi and subscribing to a community here. We would have no way of knowing who it is or stopping them. Defederation is a tool to prevent brigading, not lurking.
If (if) Meta wanted to set a lemmy-style platform, preemptively defederating from it would be a largely symbolic gesture. Doesn't mean it's not worth doing, like I said we'll cross that bridge if and when it becomes relevant.
The "user data" (comments, posts, votes, etc) that would be available to a hypothetical instance owned my Meta is already public for anyone, so not much we have control over there. "Defederating" essentially just means "blanket banning" a bunch of users at once.
We're aware of the pact and will cross that bridge when (or if) it ever really happens. We're certainly no fans of Meta (or Reddit,or Twitter). So far it seems more likely to affect Mastodon than Lemmy/Kbin.
I installed some community made themes (like darkspace) just to play around and give users some options, but yeeeah... none of them are very good. Thankfully the admin team knows a bit of CSS from their redditing days so a theme improvement is definitely on the to do list.
If anyone wants to have a go at making one, be my guest, I'd be happy to add it to the options.
True, but following the instance directly can be a bit of a firehose of information since you get ALL posts and comments. We wanted to have a place to alert for scheduled maintenance, events, and stuff like that.
The only perk we had in mind thus far was some user flair (whenever that inevitably gets invented). But you make a great point. Still getting used to this egalitarian perspective.
We've been targeted too by what's probably a couple of script kiddies trying to brute force their way into our server. Not exactly a DDOS but a similar effect. Just had to remodulate the shields a few times.