Hello,

Starting today, Nord.pub implements a few default instance blocks for new users.

This block does not affect any existing user accounts, and can be removed from the user settings. The main purpose is to provide a more curated and pleasant default user experiance.

To remove a blocked instance, simply go to https://nord.pub/user/settings/filters and remove the blocks from the instances tab at the bottom of the page. Or if you are an existing user who want to block these instance, add the blocks there.

What does this mean?

When an instance is blocked, you will not see any content from that instance on the site. This includes:

• All communities from the instance will be hidden.
• All posts from users on the instance, to any other community will be hidden
• All comments by users on the instance will be hidden.

Additionally, PieFed will try to avoid sending your posts and comments to instances that you have blocked. This works similarly to a defederation, but on a user level. However, in most cases the instance which owns the community will distribute posts/comments anyway (unless it also blocks the target instance).

What is blocked?

NSFW instances

First of all, instances that are explicitly focused on posting NSFW content will be blocked. This is purely to make seeing pornographic content an extra opt-in step, and separate from the "Hide NSFW" filter since there is a lot of non-pornographic content that is marked as NSFW.

The only instance in question is: fedinsfw.app, as this is the only NSFW instance of significant size.

Lemmy.ml & Co.

Secondly, the "Tankie" instances will be blocked for new users, due to them using their position to spread Russian and Authoritarian propaganda and silence opposing voices in their communities.

This thread describes the issue in much more details that I could, including a lot of examples: https://nord.pub/post/491493

• lemmy.ml
• lemmygrad.ml
• hexbear.net

Instances spreading extreme/illegal content

Finally, I have added a set of instances to the site-wide blocklist. This is instances that have multiple reports of CSAM, Pedophilia, or Zoophilia on https://gui.fediseer.com.

This will have next to no impact as most of these instances has never federated at all, and from the ones which has connected there has been less than 10 posts over the past 9 months.

Hello,

Just a quick heads up that I am seeing a lot of traffic today, which seems to be mostly scrapers. This causes the site to be quite slow and may throw an occasional error.

I have increased the sensitivity of the CDN Shield to high in the hopes that it will block most of it. This means that you may see challenge screens from BunnyCDN.

If this is not resolved by tonight I will look at further mitigations.

Update: The service has been stable since yesterday around 14:15 CEST. Unfortunately the CDN Shield setting didn't appear to make much difference but the scraping storm eventually died off anyway.

I have also increased the amount of CPU each container can utilize which should make the site more resilient in case of repeats. The NUM_CPUS setting was left at 2, which is fine for the baseline load of ~5-10%, but prevented it from using more than ~150% CPU when under heavy load, while the VMs have 6 CPUs available.

Edit: Never mind, it works now. Thanks.

I am getting this non-descriptive error message when logging in and when trying to go to my home feed:

A quick status update to acknowledge that Nord.pub had ~1 hour of downtime yesterday.

This was caused due to an update and configuration change of the underlying infrastructure. Applying the configuration change accidentally unmade another unrelated setting, which caused the ingress controller containers (which direct public HTTPS to the correct backend service) to be scheduled on nodes they were not supposed to run on. This in turn caused them to be unreachable from the internet, causing the outage.

Additionally there was an issue with the redis-ha deployment, causing some exception error messages once the site became accessible again, although that was resolved within a few minutes.

So, small introduction to this instance: It's a generic instance, mainly targeting the Nordics, simply because I myself is from Sweden and wanted an host that is geographically close. That said since the vast majority of content is global an in English this will also be the primary language of this instance.

The reason I am doing this is because I want to add my small contribution in creating an alternative to the large US-controlled social media networks. I really like this concept of smaller separate instances that federate to provide an experience similar to the big centralized networks. Given that I have about a decade of experience of system administration, and decent amount of free cash flow, I figured that the best way to support the Fediverse is creating another instance to share the load... and it also helps that I do like self-hosted things.

Topics

I have tried to create a somewhat curated set of Topics for new users to start from. I'm mostly happy about the communities but there may be some small changes and consolidation of Topics ahead.

Being an instance focused on the Nordic community there is also Topics with Nordic language specific communities.

Communities

At this point I have no intention of creating any new communities based on this instance, simply because most generic communities already exists on other servers and I don't see a point in further fragmentation.

Creation of communities is open for all members, so if you would feel like this instance is a good place for your community I invite you to go ahead!

Federation

My philosophy on federation is that it should be as open as possible. Other communities shouldn't be blocked on an instance level except in extreme cases. This may mean that this instance will allow federation from instances that has been blocked from other instances, at least for now. I may change this in the future but I hope not to have to.

Before completely blocking an entire instance softer methods will be tried, like exclusion of content from default feeds and topics. Remember that you as a user always have the option to block users, communities, or entire instances from your settings.

Of course instances that participate in straight up malicious activities that affects the experience will still be blocked. For instance:

• Sharing of Illegal content
• Straight up Spam.
• Vote manipulation

Infrastructure

A core guiding principle in setting up the infrastructure for this instance has been to avoid any dependency on US-based infrastructure. The main providers is:

• CDN provided by Bunny.net, a company based in Slovenia.
• Dedicated servers and S3 storage provided by Hetzner (German company), from their Helsinki datacenter.

In a nutshell the infrastructure consists of a Kubernetes cluster spanning 3 dedicated servers from Hetzner. Including some tools like CloudnativePG for automated HA/Failovers and backups of the database. This will ensure high availability and tolerance of hardware issues. More information about this will probably follow in another post.

There are still some work to be done to fully detach from American companies

• SMTP is sent through AWS, this will be addressed once Hetzner unlocks port 25 for email sending.
• Some backend DNS is still handled by AWS/Cloudflare DNS.

I will be honest though that at the moment I am just a single administrator and this may pose an operational risk due to the bus factor.

Feedback

Don't hesitate to post in the comments or create new discussions in this meta communities if you have any questions or feedback about this instance.

Here's a screenshot of the error: