There's currently an incident involving some kind of Japanese skids who call themselves the "Kuroneko" organization.
They seem to be attempting to commit DDoS attacks on Misskey servers, constantly creating new accounts on compromised instances and spamming advertisements for their hacking services.
Admins who are federating with these compromised servers, while they might not get compromised themselves, may be affected by the sheer amount of traffic volume from their spam.
Admins are advised to #fediblock or temporarily stop sending requests to affected servers for now, if they don't want to get secondhand DoS'd
IMO I never expected them to be Japanese out of all things, kinda funny. They also host VOICEROID and VOICEVOX TTS bots on their Discord apparently. Kinda a weird flex I guess.
#fediadmins are advised to temporarily disable sign-ups for now, or implement some anti-spam measure to limit signups to not get spammed.
Currently they are targeting #misskey and #mastodon, but other #activitypub servers may soon be targeted.
Ahhh, who’d be a Mastodon admin, eh? I’ve lost count of the countless late nights and weekends and frantic hours I’ve spent keeping two instances running and all of their users happy, and have definitely got far more grey hair as a result of it.
And quite often I get grief from people for trying to do my job.
And you know what? I wouldn’t change it for anything 😜
This is VERY bad news for users of small instances like myself.
I do understand the reasoning behind it, and I'm not sure there is a good alternative. But it sure feels a bit like a deja vu from the self hosted email days ...
@thisismissem@astro@michael You're probably right about the Streaming API, but I don't think I or any other small instance admin can do much to make the large instances to join a relay. Most of the large ones aren't using any, and I haven't noticed that even those operated by @Gargron would be using them. When Streaming API is blocked, their feeds will be unavailable to my small instance.
This change will probably not have much effect to largest instances, but will affect negatively all the small ones which have been relying on services like fedi.buzz to be aware of what is happening in the #fediverse