Sorry for the downtime and we will try to communicate the problem better in the future.
You did the right thing, going down immediately.
The solution for the announcement problem is to do it "out of band", as the communications engineers call it. That is: use a different medium. May be a webpage or even twitter or whatever. Ideally let everybody know your method in advance (make an announcement policy :-)) so the users know where to look for the info.
A custom error ?
Just kidding . A script kiddy is trying to hack us.
Yes this is exactly how to do it. Maybe have a mastodon account to post updates if the instance is down ?
I also want to mention this happened at 2 or 3 AM EST, which only had 2 admins on, me and the hoster. I should've made a post, but given the severity, lack of info, and lack of staff members, we both decided to shut it down immediately until it was patched. I personally apologize for the downtime but I hope it's understandable why we did it this way. In case something like this happens again, I'll post it in the FMHY Divolt server.
Sometimes you unfortunately have to choose between safety and communication. In this case you chose safety, which even if it didn't end up being warranted was the right call IMO. Thanks for putting in all the effort.
Not only understandable, but I'm glad that's how you guys handled it. Leaving it up seems irresponsible to me, although I'm not blaming any admins who did.
I'm glad you guys had the time to do it at all. Also shows this layered universe stuff is not that bad, so much harder to do harm.
Good thing you are back guys.
so what security concerns should we be worried about? I didnt have my computer on or logged in, am I at risk of a virus or personal information being leaked or something?
Appreciate your proactive measures and quickly getting the server up again and patched. Also thanks to all of the admins for their hard work going into the server!
I support the decision regarding exploding heads.
Related.. Has fmhy also blocked Meta/threads? While I don't think we should be like Beehaw over here, there are certain places that deserve defederation and Meta/corporate interests are at the top of that list for me.
Right now it's not even mastodon compatible let alone lemmy. There are some arguments on how federating with them will allow people to migrate to a more privacy respecting instance and still view threads content, and some users say this will allow them to still communicate with their friends who don't want to switch away from threads.
So while we do lean towards defederating from it, it's some months away before we need to actually decide and till then we are simply listening to and discussing both sides of the argument.
Ah good old censorship, always the answer
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