delendum

This is a Lemmy-ui bug, not related to CDN/cache.

I had submitted a bug report for it some time ago but it’s not that urgent in the great scheme of things so they didn’t get around to it yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1865

(the report speaks about this happening after you log in, but it’s the same thing).

Have you thought of self-hosting mailcow? https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

It’s very easy to set up and fairly straightforward to maintain, if you have a static IP and it’s not impossible to get a PTR record then I highly recommend it. Yes you’re self hosting your own mail server but mailcow vastly simplifies this.

Alternatively plonking it on the right VPS can also work.

My 2 cents:

Simple, no domain required stuff:

• Pi-hole for self-hosted DNS: https://pi-hole.net/
• Navidrome for self-hosted music server: https://www.navidrome.org/ (best to pair this with an external portable HDD/SSD for music storage)
• Set up syncthing on it and use it for automatic file back-up: https://syncthing.net/ (that external HDD/SSD will come in handy again).

More advanced, should pair with a domain:

• Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won’t be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
• Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.

Defederation is simultaneously very useful and very dangerous.

Large instances have the power to kill smaller ones by defederating them, since they control an overwhelming share of Fediverse content. That is a lot of power in the hands of a small group of people, each potentially with their own views and agendas.

I think defederation should be reserved for openly malicious servers and used as an absolute last resort. Think of the Internet and how horrible it would be if countries decided to just disconnect from other countries based on conflicting ideologies.

The vast majority of users on legitimate instances just want to explore interesting things, share some thoughts and have a good time. Defederating hurts legitimate users the most, trolls can easily hop instances and find another way to troll.

If you always had e-mail verification turned on then you can get rid of some of these junk sign-ups relatively easy, I wrote a guide for it here: https://lemdit.com/post/16430

From what I’ve seen, most of the bot sign-ups that are swelling instance User numbers wouldn’t have passed e-mail verification. I think it was done mostly to prove a point, rather than an attempt to actually use those accounts.

Instances that didn’t have e-mail verification turned on are in a much harder spot.