[…] it sounds like you’re arguing that the downtime is because of massive user registrations and not from an attack like they said themselves […]
I have no idea where their downtime is from. If it is DOS-related, though, they would protect against it using a DDOS protection service like CloudFlare, which costs $$$
Lemmy.world hasn’t done anything to suggest they would be a significant privacy and security risk to users, at least not yet
[…], pushing ads to federated servers or collecting and selling user data would absolutely change that I guarantee it.
We’ll see, but the larger they grow, the more permanent they get, and ads only affects that so much.
I didn’t and won’t go as far to accuse the instance owners themselves of being behind the attack but I won’t say it isn’t a user from Hexbear because nether you or I can prove that it isn’t.
Hexbear is not more suspect than other instances, and there is no reason to name-drop Hexbear, alone, in particular. If they’re being DOSed, then whoever is responsible is most likely involved in a community that has a culture of DOSing in general, like a Chan, maybe the same one that has actively been responsible for vandalizing Lemmy instances.