Why doesn't lemmy show communities in the 'all' section unless people from your server are already subscribed to him? (unilem.org)

submitted 1 year ago by bobman@unilem.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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It's excruciatingly obnoxious to have to rely on third party sources for what should be a first-party feature.

Like, I select all and then search a query. "Oh no, nobody on your server used a third party service to find it, so you won't see it here."

Like, how short-sighted is that, really? If I search for a string in the 'all' servers, I should have a list of 'all' the servers containing that string.

It's a really simple concept. Not sure why this post even has to be made, but I'm wondering if there's something I can do to make these 'features' more intuitive.

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[-] Zalack@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sorry you're right that I wasn't being precise with my terminology. It's not a DDOS but it could be used to slow down targeted features, take up some HTTP connections, inflate the target's DB, and waste CPU cycles, so it shares some characteristics of one.

In general, you want to be very very careful of implementing features that allow untrusted parties to supply potentially unbounded resources to your server.

And yeah, it would be trivial to write a set of scripts that pretend to be a lemmy instance and supply an endless number of fake communities to the target server. The nice thing about this attack vector is that it's also not bound by the normal rate limiting since it's the target server making the requests. There are definitely a bunch of ways lemmy could mitigate such an attack, but the current approach of "list communities current users are subscribed to" seems like a decent first approach.

this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023

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