Hello. We're back!

First, we must begin with apologies. It has been a long time.

Working together with a few trusted members of Synapse Admin on Matrix.org (who will remain anonymous), used for communication of issues between Synapse Administrators, we were able to recover the server, but the damage had already been done to the massive user base. We apologize greatly for that. The only thing left to do was notify our space that we would be shutting down indefinitely. This was not something we took lightly, as we were a large community at the time, with many active members in many rooms, and it was a shame to have to toss that away for an unknown time. 

Anonymous Planet has taken much time to reflect on the past. Before we detail the new services for our shiny new Matrix space, we would like to explain our absence and the confusion it may have caused. We lost the old server aimed at anonymousplanet.net for technical reasons related to Postgres migration and size requirements. There was speculation this was sabotage by the old administrator (not true, in this case), as many of you will know already, sabotage was occurring elsewhere. We cannot detail that without risking exposing critical information about the previous owners of the Matrix space which could paint a history of their past that could reveal mental health issues, and blame culture is not what we aim to enforce. We do, however, believe in the well-being of all, continuity of the space, and accountability for the administrators. There was a huge issue with illegal material being disseminated on our server by a troll, but the Matrix network admins and the appropriate authorities were a huge help in that case. We addressed the issue privately at the time. Then it was on to greener pastures.

The real technical reason…

It turned out, we actually had a small bug in the backup system at the time, Borg Backup, causing databases to not only triple, but sometimes quadruple in size--from our 30GB to nearly 90GB-120GB, a size which couldn't be accommodated--and we had to shut it down to keep the infrastructure of Anonymous Planet from being overwritten by the Postgres installation. At that time, we also didn't have any load balancing, but we did have threat management courtesy of the actual server admins (Das Kilbourn and myself). Unfortunately, the server was a quarter of the needed size to handle this weird triple inflation of our old Anonymous Planet database. That caused me a lot of stress attempting to fix, and in the end it caused many more smaller problems with migration of the users and messages. We had attempted to use another larger server, but the issue was not the Postgres database itself, but the service used to automatically create backups on-prem. In the end, no user data was exposed, thanks to database encryption and service integrity. All data we could not restore has been securely erased.

Now, where do we go from here?

We learned a lot from our community and our friends at #HackLiberty and other privacy and security related spaces, about network management and service fluidity. Thanks for being patient, again, while services were restored (mostly). We're rolling out bridges and other fun things too, but it takes time. Now, we have new services, new servers, better tools and more knowledge of this particular issue to help us achieve the space we always wanted. That includes network security and moderation, as well as scripts for daily tasks and worker management.

You can join the new Matrix space, PSA Community, but we need to keep users low while we roll out the changes to the network over the next week. We are introducing a new (but not to us) security infrastructure and threat management platform, designed and ran by our very qualified SysOp and server administrator Nope, to handle any sort of issues we might have with our servers. We will not fail you again.

Thank you to all of you

...even those who simply stood around in the dark waiting for the light to turn back on. You, who helped us get here, and thanks especially to the team at Matrix and Hack Liberty for your technical diagnosis and identifying the problem, while you are anonymous, you are appreciated.

Let's build a better space and get back to work creating and maintaining a safer, more accessible digital landscape for those who need it.

Any questions, thoughts or concerns can go to [email protected].

Yours truly,
Anonymous Planet