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 $$$

They currently do use Cloudflare actually, doesn't magically stop all forms of DDoS though (ever heard of SQL queries, some of them can take seconds to execute). Anyway I only said that because a big misconception by people is that Lemmy.world's uptime problem is caused by "the Reddit hug of death" as in user traffic and that it's a scaling issue, when it isn't.

They have, though. The LemmyWorld admins doxxed a user who they believed (incorrectly) to be Hexbear admin CARCOSA@hexbear.net. Source: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/1754850

That's pretty bad, though honestly it still pales in comparison to Facebook's awful history with collection and selling user data, though I guess how each instance views it. Maybe lemmy.ml (one of the biggest instances to ban threads) would use this to justify defederating from world (maybe I'll let them know about it and see what they say, I know they're certainly not going to go hunting for it on their own).

We’ll see, but the larger they grow, the more permanent they get, and ads only affects that so much.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how it pans out

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.

I have indeed seen many things that do elevate Hexbear on the list as of the possible origins of an attack, but there isn't any reason it couldn't also be from one of the chans or any instance that was defederated from them.

It does seem a bit weird to me though that you are strangely adamant about defending Hexbear, which does also make me slightly more suspicious, though that isn't definitive, many people will defend their instances for totally innocuous reasons. Anyway we're done with this, there was drama and concern (from several instances, not just world) and there's no point in arguing about it when we can't prove anything for certain here. Also this isn't exactly the place for a debate, this is c/piracy not a debate forum.