@LMAO is flooding the site with random communities because they’re salty about being banned for claiming too many community names. They claim they’re trying to “fuck your entire site up” but I imagine it’s a relatively quick fix to delete all the communities they’re creating, LMAO.
I can imagine that in the next few days we’ll discover everything the devs didn’t think about prior to this. Part of the fun.
Moderation on decentralized networks is way harder than otherwise, which was already a constant battle.
I’m sure the devs thought of an attack but it gets deprioritized over fixing bugs and performance. I don’t think Lemmy was ready for Reddit’s collapse the way mastodon was with Twitter.
Mastodon was far from ready for the first Twitter wave either. And there’s also the question of whether the fediverse model can actually handle this much traffic, there’s a lot of inefficient back and forth messaging between instances that’s essentially baked into the protocol, something that’s the opposite of what you need to do in a distributed system.
Hopefully we get the same community of moderation tools springing up that Reddit had. Bonus: they can actually be integrated into the base tooling this time!
As General Patton famously said: no social media website survives contact with its trolls.
Also the things they thought of, but haven’t been a priority to address until it became a problem.