Ah that makes perfect sense. LW also gets a ton of hate, as too does PieFed, so I can well imagine trolls going so far as attacking it (obviously that’s my conspiracy theory hat on, but who knows - although “death to the infidels” does seem to me like it may include some light hacking of infidel-owned machines if they can get away with it… - yet it being purely due to AI scraping is unfortunately equally plausible)

Oh… oh, my, this is not at all what I was trying to describe. Wow this is such a vivid and incredibly imaginative narrative, I cannot possibly conceptualize that this could be true. No, I was referring to multiple DDoS attacks and AI bot scrapers overwhelming the server. Nothing so florid or colorful. No, much more mundane. sorry to disappoint you!

Lemmy may be argumentative and adversarial, but outright black hat cyber warfare? Ha ha ha ha… no.

But what a picture you painted! consider writing a sci-fi novel!

Again, this is a very small instance. When it gets overwhelmed with a gigantic amount of traffic suddenly, it doesn’t handle it well, and the admin will take it down to make tweaks before bringing it back online, and sometimes that that will take a little while. but they’re very proactive, and that’s a good thing!