Ahoy m@tes, the scraping bot situation has been escalating recently, as you all may have already noticed by the recent site instability and 5xx error responses. @tenchiken@anarchist.nexus has been scrambling to block new scraping subnets as they appear, but these assholes keep jumping providers so it's been an endless loop and constant firefighting.

I finally had enough and decided to onboard a Proof-of-Work countermeasure, very much like Anubis which has been very popular on the fediverse lately. However I went with Haphash which has been especially designed around haproxy (our reverse proxy of choice) and is hopefully much more lightweight.

The new PoW shield has already been activated on both Divisions by Zero on Fediseer as well. It's not active on all URLs,. but it should be protecting those which have the most impact on our database, which is what was causing the actual issue. You should notice a quick loading screen on occasion while it's verifying you.

We've already seen a significant reduction in 5xx HTTP errors, as well as a slight reduction in traffic, so we're hoping this will make a good impact in our situation.

Please do let us know if you run into any issues, and also let us know if you feel any difference in responsiveness. The first m@ates already feel it's all snappier, but that just be placebo.

And let's hope the next scraping wave is not pwned residential botnets, or we're all screwed >_<

It seems cloudflare has gone down and brought down half the internet, including half the fediverse. Lucky for us, the divisions by zero, is not hosted in cloudflare for that reason. Unlucky for the flotilla, the anarchist.nexus is on CF.

Nevertheless, switch over to your /0 account to continue using the threadiverse as usual.

shakes first Tenchikeeeeeeeen!

This is a proposal to have a weekly event where users could nominate and vote on a “Dbzer0 user of the week” to promote community engagement, also it would be fun as hell, this event could happen like on a weekend and could run from friday to sunday or friday to saturday

Courtesy of the living chaos that is @Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com. Feel free to share!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/53548211

Are you 100% lemmy/mbin/piefed for your forum/thread life or are you still using reddit for something?

It has come to my attention that there is some minor unrest on Hexbear due to statements they believe I made that they did not appreciate. there has been some small misunderstanding regarding them, so allow me, dear reader, to make my position clear so these terrible rumors can be put to rest.

some time ago, another user on our matrix asked for tips on trolling Hexbear in their communities. specifically, they asked what might be said that would garner the most rage. as I generally consider myself to be the obliging sort, I offered what pearls of wisdom I could.

now, a thoughtful reader might wonder why I didn't react with abject horror at the idea of someone trolling Hexbear, for that, I can only say that perhaps I thought it was proper comuppence for the brigading and harassment Hexbear used to perpetrate across the fediverse.

but I digress. the specific pearls of wisdom I offered were as such.

le gasp! how terrible! what scoundrel, what worthless cur would say that the soviet civilians deserved such a fate! genocide! fascist! liberal!

as you might have guess, discerning reader, Hexbear posits that such a scoundrel is me. they insist, that by saying the soviets deserved what they got, that I am actively supporting the genocide of twenty-seven million civilians. there are two problems with this, however.

one, I never said civilians. this is a word put into my mouth by tankies that are too fucking stupid to understand plain english. one would think that it is pretty obvious that it wasn't some poor farmer that was invading Poland for profit, but if one were to think such, then one wouldn't be a braindead tankie shitstain, and would instead be someone at least capable of the level of higher thought that evolution gave a jellyfish. it's pretty obvious to normal people that the ones gleefully invading other countries alongside the nazis were, in fact, soldiers. here they were at least right when they assumed I was gleefully celebrating the deaths of those soldiers. they fought with the nazis, they invaded other countries, and they don't get to absolve themselves of working with the nazis just because hitler turned on them, and tankies think that the country that supposedly single-handily fought and won WW2 are also the poor victims of the war, who had no choice in their actions.

two, there were no soviet civilians, merely innocent asian/eastern european souls that were held hostage by the soviet oligarchy and forced into starvation and destitution by an authoritarian system that valued propaganda more than human beings. the vast majority of those people probably would not have chosen to live in a dystopian hellhole were they given a chance, any more than the average North Korean wants to starve to death under the Kims. they were as much soviets as you or I, merely people with no freedom, and no other option but to live under the crushing boot of the imperialist USSR. they didn't help the nazis, because they were powerless in the face of the state.

neither of these two points has stopped Hexbear from whipping themselves into a frothing echo chamber of self-righteous disgust and anger, and demanding that I be removed from my mod positions and banned. a demand which has, so far, fallen on deaf ears that are used to the utter bullshit so often spewed by these feckless internet warriors. if there was an award for arguing in bad faith, we all know the reeking denizens of the lower planes we all colloquially call The Triad would win it.

as you probably have gathered by now, this is not an apology. I did not do anything wrong, especially not what they have accused me of, and so I will not apologize for it. not that they would be willing to consider such an apology anyway, because for them there is only one truth, and that is that they are always right, and everyone who is not them is an enemy and always wrong.

now, they have banned me, and so they can't see this, so I will instead tag @cowbee@lemmy.ml, a known affiliate of these heathens, who spent three paragraphs the other day downplaying the persecution of LGBT+ in the USSR before grudgingly using a mere two sentences in admitting the treatment.

my one regret, of course, is that since I have now blocked everyone from The Triad, I won't be able to read the no doubt angry replies they are fiercely typing out, in which they'll likely pour over my history to try and find something they can spin as damning evidence to back up their preconceptions. actually, now that I consider it, I find I don't regret that at all.

in conclusion, I want to say thank you to the comrades that have supported me through these almost trying times, fuck you to the haters who want to be me, and thank you to the haters who made the thread about me on c/Slop like I asked. you're the real MVP!

as this post pointed out, I was an asshole, And I took trolling too far, genocide denial or harming the community was not my intention as I was trying to find reasons to troll hexbear through my two accounts, I do not represent Dbzer0 or AN in anyway possible, and that post doesn’t represent my views at all, it was just a shitty attempt at humour that went too far, you could consider this an apology, you have every right to hate me, but if you all have the space in your hearts to forgive me, it would be much appreciated. then again it were probably be best to just ban me as it’s not what I want, but it’s probably best for the community, I have learned from my mistake but i’d never be able to live with it, like anyone else Im not perfect

Searches come up empty.

I can /reach/ the communities if I craft the right URL. But it’s a bit inconvenient that searching does not work -- at least, not in the Alexandria client or whatever it’s called.

Hey peeps, it seems out instance is suddenly experiencing some intermittent slowdowns, and the occasional 503 error. Typically this means we're being hit with a GenAI scraping wave and these things tend to come and go until we can trace where the load is coming from and stop it. Unfortunately I'm currently AFK so until @tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com can come online and take a look, we just have to live with it. Until then, I suggest you switch to our tesseract frontend, as it seems to be slightly more resistant in my experience, so you might not notice this as much. Alternatively you can use anarchist.nexus to keep browsing the threadiverse from the flotilla.

PS: blame stamets 😜

Hello!

I tried making an enshittification comm inspired some a few recent posts.

But when I tried posting to the comm, I got an error that language (probably shit) is not allowed.

I can live without the comm but it was kind of a bummer. If anything can be easily done, I would appreciate it. No pressure though.

Ever since I created this instance, I wanted this corner of the fediverse to explore new radical ways to run online social media which attempts to tear down the built-in hierarchies of website hosting. The first step of this was the introduction of admin recalls a while ago, and when some of my co-admins approached me about also adding a piefed.dbzer0.com domain I saw an opportunity to attempt something I've been mulling on for a while: An Anarchist Confederation!

You see, the issue with running a social media, is that there's always a hierarchy with one person or organization having "the keys to the kingdom", whether this is the person with sudo access, or the one who bought the domain etc. This is an inescapable reality of website hosting we cannot get around (Yes, I'm aware of things like nostr etc, but those have ending issues that are beyond the scope of this post). So at the end, you always end up with some form of BDFL, or at best, a non-profit somewhere with an oligarchy of people controlling it.

The Fediverse system is a good-ish solution to that. We get to have social media without any one entity controlling the whole network, but we still have a ton of (beefing) kings and kingdoms instead. Places go down, places come up, people are not sure where to set up accounts and so on. And each of those fediverse instances still have that inherent hierarchy, so the members of say, lemmy.world, are still beholden to the actions of its admins, and their only option is to uproot their whole presence there and go elsewhere, without any safety that the next admin won't cause them issues as well.

So I had the idea, what if we create one single entity, which is nevertheless still not controlled by any one person? When you join that entity, you still get to know what it stands for, and can choose any of the services it operates, but most of those services will be run by different people, so it's not possible for one of them to go rogue or have a burnout and ruin the whole thing.

Ultimately, this approach is meant to protects you, from people like me, pre-emptively.

So when the idea was floated of running an anarchist piefed along with /0, I suggested this concept to the other admins, who happily agreed to give it a try. This had the added benefit of not adding yet more website hosting overhead to myself and to also give a more stable stake to the admins who did the hosting job. Now not only do the admins of anarchist.nexus have the piefed instance they wanted, but they have the extra safety of me not being able to ruin the whole thing by having a burnout/meltdown/stroke or being arrested/disappeared etc.

But the point is not merely to have yet another fediverse instance. The idea here is that we're much more tightly woven together, which further increases the social costs of someone going rogue, as well as strengthens the bonds of all the people involved, making us stronger as a team. What does this mean in practice? All the Flotilla members agree to the following:

Same Rules

This means that all instances in the flotilla follow the same rules, including those voted by our combined community. This means that whether you're part of lemmy.dbzer0.com or anarchist.nexus, we're still following the same code of conduct, we have the same rules like admin recalls, disengage and so on. You can choose your flavor or software, without having to worry about re-learning new rules or admin idiosyncrasies.

Same staff

The Flotilla is built around the idea of sharing workloads. So the members of the instances agree to have admins and sysadmins which can float between them. This is not only meant to strengthen the common control, but also the trust and finally to only require one announcement for new admins, instead of having to have different admin onboarding/recalls per service.

This doesn't necessarily mean that each admin/sysadmin will be active in all instances. For example I don't have the time to be actively involved in anarchist.nexus atm, but I could easily do so if I found it. This creates a much easier way to spread our abilities according to our needs. People who have more capacity, can smoothly go to help in more instances, while those overwhelmed can dedicate themselves to fewer. We hope this both reduces the chance of burnout and gives flotilla members greater flexibility, by being able to use their preferred fediverse software, while staying within a community they helped build-up.

Common Governance

As a natural extension of those two concepts above. The instances will have a shared governance system. This means we will have a common governance community and voting structure. All validated members of the flotilla will be able to vote in governance threads with the same restrictions as we have now.

Likewise, all instances will have a normalized defederation list, which will be handled by following each other's censures on the fediseer, and all bans will be also common from the instances as well. So the flotilla decides person A is not welcome, they're not welcome in all our fleet!

The anarchist.nexus is hopefully just the first instance in our fleet (all kudos go to @fxomt@anarchist.nexus and @tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com) and a proof-of-concept for the whole attempt. If this goes well, we may be able to extend to other software in the future.

As with everything novel, there's bound to be teething issues we're going to encounter, but we're commited to figuring it out with all of you.

And of course, go and join https://anarchist.nexus/ if that's more your speed!

Hey, all Genpers

anyone can keep us updated about GenP's news and what happening, please. cuz I don't find anything online :)

Not sure this is the right place for this. Seems like a Lemmy feature vs a db0 feature, however: I'd like to be able to click on the Name, or Subscribers, or any of the top-level fields and sort them, but it does not seem to work.

I can use the drop box to sort by Top posts, old, hot, etc.

Hey m@tes (this still has not grown on me 🥲) I created this community to submit custom emojis. This is not official since I'm doing this for fun, and the other admins didn't take part in this. !emojis@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Just post an emoji and I'll add it lol (only if it doesn't break the rules

That's it. This is a very small thing but I think it could be fun, have a good day/night everyone.

I just wanted to mention something that has been bothering me slightly. People keep referring to this instance as "db0" because it's quicker to type, but, well, that's just the username I've been using for the past 20+ years

Can I convince the m@tes to switch to calling it /0 for short if dbzer0 is too long for you?

Feel free to make any other suggestions here.

I know I haven't been active since I began this very intense full time job (to go with my full time school) but I just got an email that said my subscription has gotten cancelled again.

Is there any way to stop that happening?

Sorry if this is the wrong place. Don't have a lot of time to look for the right one. Thanks!

'Allo m@tes, for some inexplicable reason we're all still here after yet another year in this fucked up world, so I thought it would be a good time to recap what we've done as it's been a fairly busy year for our growth and maturity.

2024 Notable Events

2024 Canvas

Soon after our new year celebration, the 2024 canvas happened and we had fun. I blogged a bit about that event here.

Apropos the 2025 Canvas is almost upon us, so start making some plans!

Mlmym retired and Tesseract (re-)added

We had to retire our mlmym (i.e. old.reddit) interface as it was abandoned and was running into issues. Interestingly, the lemmy.world crowd seems to have started maintaining it somewhat on their own, so maybe we'll re-add it in the future.

At the same time we've redeployed Tesseract and it's quickly become on my favourite frontends.

Radical Instance Democracy

Threativore, the core admin tool I've developed to support our instance has grown with leaps and bounds. Through it. we implemented some radical and unique approaches to our instance governance as well as some cool features like user flair, vouching, flagging systems, welcome messages and more.

We've already used the voting system to create mandates on how to handle our instance and it certainly helps the crew know that the direction we sail is a welcomed one. Some examples:

• Banning Xitter links - Passed
• Sanctioning off-topic comments - Passed
• Reversing an instance ban - Failed

So many new subscribers!

This years we're had multiple large join waves

We're nowhere close to the lemmy.world of course, but last I checked, we're the 5th largest based on Monthly Active Users, and soon to be 4th after lemm.ee shuts down, which I think is impressive for the instance with the a difficult domain to remember, a 2 page application form, and and some spicy takes on politics. 😅

Benevolent Poison

We recently added more countermeasures for the asocial corporate bots swarming the internet, by onboarding Iocaine among other countermeasures. Fun news. The GPTBot is the most greedy, delving 300-page deep in garbage.

Accessibility and Translations

We added the rblind themes instance-wide before it was cool , and now of course everyone who upgrades to 0.19.12 also has them.

At the same time, we added Korean, Greek and Spanish translations to our application form and golden rules which you can see and improve in our wiki.

Staff

We've added 2 new moderators @fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @YarrMatey@lemmy.dbzer0.com and one new sysadmin @tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com to our instance who have already proved their weight in doubloons! Things are scaling up nicely!

Matrix

Our real-time matrix channels have been growing busier in later months and it's great to see all you weirdos interact! For the rest of you, what are you waiting for?

Membership

I know you've all been waiting for it, so here's another breakdown of our membership alignments as of this date

Analysis Results:
-----------------
Historical Pirate: 757 (7.9%)
Digital Pirate: 2095 (21.9%)
Pirate Tools: 1212 (12.7%)
Fictional Character: 831 (8.7%)
FOSS advocate: 2415 (25.2%)
Free Software: 1286 (13.4%)
Anarchist: 1304 (13.6%)
ASD: 227 (2.4%)
ADHD: 509 (5.3%)
Other: 342 (3.6%)
Unparseable: 0 (0.0%)

Total Answers Analyzed: 9572
Answers matching multiple categories: 1744

Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (347), Anne Bonny (55), Zheng Yi Sao (50)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (344), Aaron Swartz (291), The Pirate Bay (162)
Pirate Tools: Genp (679), BitTorrent (120), *Arrs (93)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (345), One Piece (120), Dread Pirate Roberts (71)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (721), Richard Stallman (596), Louis Rossmann (177)
Free Software: Lemmy (420), Linux (211), VLC (73)
Anarchist: Emma Goldman (154), Kropotkin (113), Chomsky (98)
Other: Anonymous (47), Elon Musk (31), O'Reilly (28)

Notable here is GenP shooting up the charts with the migration of their reddit comm, even though we've been explicitly rejecting "GenP" applications for a while, since those lazy bastards just started sharing an application answer to copy-paste even though we asked them not to do that

Funding

M@tes are clearly incredible people which is shown by how well they're taking care of their social third place. Not only have we reach our objective for the first half of 2025, but you've almost completely funded the rest of 2025 itself!

All this ensures there's no stress whatsoever about keeping the lights on. But since we sail in uncharted waters, it's good to have a little bit saved in our treasure hoard in case of...complications, so keep it up!

Ko-fi	Liberapay

Finally, I want to extend my warmest thanks to everyone who make this possible, from the staff who put their time and mental health on the line, to the donators who help sustain this endeavor, to all the commenters and voting lurkers, who keep providing the weird content we all thrive on!

On a personal note, I'm not here to build a social media empire, which is why I'm not starting a ton of dbzer0-branded social media services. I feel that putting all my efforts into one very well run instance will go further and will keep the people satisfied. Myself I'm using lemmy constantly as I'm a big believer in "dogfooding", which is why I keep adding new tweaks and features via tools like the threativore and fediseer. Point is: I don't plan to stop so long as you're all staying around to make lemmy interesting to me, so thanks for being part of the same community. I'm proud to call this my home and all of you my m@tes!

Hey m@tes, a new lemmy version just dropped which adds some really good improvements, so it's time for a quick upgrade. Things I like particularly is finally emailing rejections and displaying rejection reasons in the UI.

Let us know if you experience any issues

Hey m@tes, as y'all know, this instance has been anti-corporate GenAI positive since it's creation and as such we've typically allowed such content to be posted freely. However in the last few weeks we've had a bunch of drama from GenAI haters who insist on coming into our comms and starting slap-fights. This caused us to vote on a new rule to have the mandate to clear out this constant friction. This worked to an extent, but I think we can help foster a better community with the larger threadiverse.

One issue a lot of anti-GenAI people keep bringing is that while they can block dedicated comms like !stable_diffusion_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com, they don't have an easy option to avoid GenAI content in random other /0 comms as there's no way to filter it out. This kind of content has been seen to cause a lot of strife, because people complain about its existence, while /0 admins and mods based on the above rule, tend to sanction those complaining. This then causes drama loops with /c/YPTB and /c/FuckAI etc.

There is a good point to be made here that while we don't mind GenAI content in /0, there isn't a reason to not help others avoid it. So we want to institute the following soft rule by now:

Simply tag your posts which consist of primarily GenAI content with the [GenAI] tag in their title. Not only will frontends like Tesseract will natively parse this as a tag and display it accordingly, but people who dislike such content, can simply filter it out of their feeds. Eventually lemmy will add tags which will make this tagging more seamless, but for now a manual tag in the title will suffice.

This rule only applies to posts in non-explicit GenAI comms. The assumption is that people can simply block those comms completely anyway.

As I said, this is a soft rule for now. Soft in the sense that you're not going to be sanctioned for forgetting it, but we hope people will remind you to do so. This is a good-faith attempt by us to co-exist and help others avoid what they don't want to stumble onto, much like [NSFW] tags. So I hope you'll add do a good faith attempt to help us in this. Furthermore, people who come to posts tagged as GenAI explicitly to scold and start slap-fights, will give the admins and easier justification to clean up, since they could have just filtered out that content in the first place.

Cheers

Hi, new member and refugee of the upcoming lemm.ee shut-down.

Tried to import a broken settings json yesterday and since then I get the message to "wait a few minutes" before importing again. Raw XHR response is "rate limit exceeded". It's more than 12 hours and still get the same message.

Not complaining, just wondering what the actual cool down duration is. Would love to import my old community subscriptions all at once.

Apologies if this is the wrong community for this, I've just joined this instance but I seem to be having issues viewing some comments when logged in. Its most obvious with this post:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45866244

At the time of posting there are 11 comments on there but through the web UI and the Voyager Android app I can only see 1 (with 1 reply that won't load). Using the Jerboa mobile app I can see 5 comments with a couple of errors saying "There is no record of this comment" for the others. If I view it without being logged in I can see all the comments as expected.

This does seem to be affecting other posts as well, I'm not sure if actual posts are also being hidden or not. Is this just because my account is new? I don't remember having this problem on lemm.ee or lemmy.world

After yet another bot scraping wave forcing me to do sysadmin work at 3am, and me ranting about it on lemmy, @self@awful.systems linked me to a post that referenced iocaine which sounded a perfect way to get back on bots that don't respect our resources and time.

At the same time, we recently on-boarded @tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com as an extra sysadmin to reduce the "bus factor" of our instance (say hello), and they graciously offered some spare compute they had lying around. So I thought, since serving iocaine to bots doesn't really require any serious uptime, why not put it those resources to good use.

So after a couple of hours messing up with things, I've now deployed iocaine to protect our instance as well as fediseer. This should hopefully start messing back with these bastards by serving them some surrealistic nonsense I had squirreled away.

If you want to see this in action, set your user agent to GPTBot and visit our instance. If you find yourself trapped in iocaine somehow, just let us know.