cross-posted from: https://lemdit.com/post/408034

I like keeping across what is happening with other Lemmy instances so lestat.org was born out of this curiosity.

URL: https://lestat.org

It’s similar to lemmy-status.org but with a few notable differences:

Criteria for adding instances to Lestat

I will add any instance to Lestat based on these prerequisites:

  • The instance is listed on join-lemmy.org
  • The instance doesn’t host anything illegal in New Zealand

Free services for admins

If you are an instance admin, I can set you up with the following:

  • Automatic e-mail notifications when the status of your instance changes (e.g. it goes up or down).
  • An uptime badge for your instance in this style:

Send me a message if you’d like any of the above.

I hope you find Lestat useful!

Edit: Added clickable URL and expanded on free admin services to include badges.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•11 months ago

    Cloudflared services like ani.social are getting a “100%” available stat. That site may be up but it’s unavailable (denying availability) to something like ~1-3% of the population 100% of the time. So in principle it should never be able to achieve the 100% availability stat.

    I understand it would be quite difficult to calculate an availability figure that accounts for access restrictions to marginalized groups, because apart from Cloudflare you would not have a practical way of knowing how firewalls are configured. But one thing you could (and should) do is mark the known walled gardens in some way. E.g. put a “🌩” next to Cloudflare sites and warn people that they are not open access sites.

    The lestat.org availability listing is like a competition that actually gives a perception advantage to services that exclude people, thus rewarding them for compromising availability. I would also subtract off ~2% for all CF sites as a general rule simply because you know it’s not 100% available to everyone. They do not deserve that 100% trophy, nor is it accurate.

    • delendumOPEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      Hey, thanks for your feedback. I like your idea of labeling Cloudflared services, reporting is indeed a bit tricky for those especially if they use “Always online” to serve cached copies while the instance is down. I have some ideas on how to combat that, but labeling them also makes sense.

      I can add tags against services - I have done this for ani.social as a proof of concept, I think it works but I welcome feedback. Sorting through the entire list is a bit daunting and will take me a while, but I’ll get there.

      Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open, I’d rather we try to find other ways to level the playing field.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•11 months ago

        I think this project has some tools that might automate that:

        https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

        They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:

        https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/

        but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.

        Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open

        I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere – the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.

        • delendumOPEnglish
          2•11 months ago

          That project is a great find, thanks! A real time saver, I should have these marked up shortly.

          I’ll do some more thinking on how we represent Cloudflare instances in general, I think for the time being I may just include a short note for them as people will wonder why they’re marked anyway.

          Edit: This is now done, all Cloudflare instances marked and an explanation added.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•11 months ago

            Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.