State of the Instance (May 2023)
I know, it's the very end of June. But I've been quite busy and tired this month, and this update covers just May events anyway.
Federation update
So I've defederated a few pedophile instances:
- freak.university
- ghetti.monster
- hentai.baby
- lolison.network
- lolison.top
- nnia.space
- pedo.school
- rapemeat.solutions
- youjo.love
This does not cover "lolicon" instances, only those that straight up promote and discuss sex with real kids. Besides that, they don't seem to offer anything else of value, so this has been a trivial decision.
Eventually the blocklist might be expanded, but this batch is non-negotiable.
Security leaks (we're not affected)
On May 25th 2023, several Pleroma instances have been hit by a hack that resulted in a widespread leak of private messages. Here's why we were not affected:
The hack exploits a flaw in a feature called "media proxy", which is disabled by default. It has never been enabled on cawfee.club.
Coincidentally, a day before the hack occured, I have closed regstrations because of a spammer who was on the loose. (He has already hit us once with hundreds of accounts, see the end of this update.) The hack relied on a local user being able to upload files, so unless the hacker created his accounts in advance, he could not have gotten here.
Running out of space again
It's happening again. I keep offloading chunks of database to block storage in order to free some space on the main disk, which results in mild slowdowns, so it's not doable forever. I'm also not willing to prurge more old posts, because ultimately it won't be necessary.
You see, while purging old posts a few months ago actually free some space, it didn't purge activities (likes, boosts, reactions etc.) related to those posts, which are now just wasting space in the database. I'm assuming this was an oversight from the Pleroma devs.
Funnily enough, the Akkoma fork can do this! While I'm not going to migrate to Akkoma, this feature would really be useful so I'm planning to either backport it to Pleroma (the AGPL-3 license supports this, as far as I know) or just take the query it uses, try it out on a testing instance and then run it on Cawfee Club too. I'll try to do this sometime in July, so expect a day or two of downtime like the last time. Until then, the registrations will probably stay closed in order not to accelerate database growth.
(This is also why I'm disheartened about splitting of efforts between different projects. Of course Akkoma has a focus on different features, but something like this is also perfectly applicable to Pleroma and would benefit it as well.)
Operating costs
Everything as usual.
| Operating costs for April 2023 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) | $2.50 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 001.testing.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $39.50 USD |
| Operating costs for May 2023 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) | $2.50 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 001.testing.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $39.50 USD |