Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
I downloaded the app mlem and logged into this account, then I opened a link to a thing/group called "technology" or something close to that.
The top post was the was the first time in over 20 years of going online that I saw illegal images. No way to report it, no way to do anything but delete the app. Now I use the browser only. But other than that, kind of ok with a lot walls of text about social media ethics.
Usually stuff like this get's taken care of quickly. There are no sophisticated filters on open-source lemmy like on the big social networks to automatically censor something. It has to be done by a mod or be reported first.
Also happened to me 30 years ago in IRC (then it might have been considered funny) and on reddit. Sometimes ugly stuff slips through. (not talking about a harmless rickroll)
I am pretty sure you were just really unlucky. Let's hope trolls don't succeed in destroying a great thing.
EDIT: you can check the modlog to see if the user has been banned. Pretty sure lemmy.ml and beehaw banned the offender.
I'm sure I just got unlucky, however it certainly was a messed up first impression. I'll keep checking things out here, but I wont go back to there and risk seeing it again. As people say, that's enough internet for today.
Seems like all of the most sophisticated filters that the big social media sites use should be made open source. I’m sure they took a lot of time and money to develop, but lack of illegal images should not be an axis that social media are forced to compete on.