center]Federated Services[/center]

Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.

We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.

There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.

Macroblogging Services

These platforms support long‑form posts, similar to Facebook or blogs. They are ideal for:

• Fiction and poetry
• Technical papers and news
• Social commentary and discussion

Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.

Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.

Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the enti
re network.

Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. Ther
e are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.

We offer the following federated services:

Friendica.Eskimo.Com
Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.

Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com
Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s prim
ary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.

Mastodon.Eskimo.Com
Microblogging Services

These platforms support short‑form updates, similar to Twitter. They are best suited for:

• Quick news flashes and status updates
• Links to longer articles or media
• Casual conversation and rapid interaction

Posts are limited in length (e.g., 500 characters on Mastodon), which encourages brevity and immediacy. Longer posts from other federated platforms appear as previews with links back to the source.

NextCloud.Eskimo.Com
Nextcloud If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.

Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com
Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. We now have this site also properly federated so any images you share can be viewed on any other Fediverse site by users who follow you, and you can view images posted by anyone on any fediverse site whom you follow.

Yacy.Eskimo.Com
Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl,
but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.

I normally see between 4-5 hits/second on my webserver, about half of which is friendica traffic. Today it is 7.5 hits/second and the majority is friendica tag searches. These are coming from addresses all over the place so it would seem to be a botnet of some sort, but the nature of what it is doing does not make sense.

If the intent were to overload my server then I would expect those searches to be full-text searches rather than tag searches because the former are more CPU intensive.

If the intent were to use up my bandwidth, I'd expect a much higher level of attack and targets that return larger bodies of text. As it is these are only consuming less than 5% of my available bandwidth.

The level of traffic is slowly creeping up overtime. Looking up the IP addresses, MOST have no inverse DNS at all, few that do usually come back to private machines or servers in clouds.

I imagine this level of traffic might be an issue for some smaller web servers but if the intent were just to destroy I'd expect traffic at much higher levels and with a much faster ramp-up.

So I'm at a loss as to understand what is going on. Anyone have any ideas?