this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I set up friendica as my first foray on to the fediverse. It worked well, but as it turns out doesn't work that well with Lemmy, which was my main usecase. Well whilst trying to fix DNS issues setting up a Lemmy instance instead, I noticed my DNS logs were rather full. My Unbound DNS was getting 40k requests every 10 mins to *.activitypub-troll.cf. I don't know who or what that is, but blocking it didn't reduce the activity. At first I thought it was something to do with Lemmy as I'd forgotten I still had Friendica running. Thankfully stopping the Friendica service reduced the DNS request back to normal.

So if you've set something up recently, you might want to check if there have been any consequences in your service logs

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[–] chiisana@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I am new to the fediverse, and I don't use Friendica, so I could be entirely wrong about this. However, from what is described, perhaps Friendica has some sort of feature in which would trigger your instance to go out to fetch some data from another instance. Someone exploited this feature, spammed your instance with content from assortment of subdomains on the *.activitypub-troll.cf domain, and most if not all of them are probably non-existent. As result of that, your server is re-checking every 10 minutes to see if they've came back online. This would also explain why shutting down the Friendica service resolved the problem for you.