Hello everyone, We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for
the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material)
posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from
another instance since we changed our registration policy. We k...
The fact that some of you are putting the blame on instance owners/moderators is just showing that you have about the same amount of brain rot as the people actually posting this vile trash
Honestly, my first thoughts were that reddit had probably funded some blackhats to sabotage shit because they're still salty. Then, they could have it reported.
Ignore these people telling you that you're being too paranoid. I assumed the same about the series of DDoS attacks that lemmy.world experienced in the last few months. Reddit admins trying to undercut lemmy's growing popularity "by any means necessary" is perfectly logical. DDoS followed by content attacks even follows Reddit's own struggles over the years.
Not saying to go with CloudFlare (just showing how the detection works overall), but some kind of builtin detection system coded into Lemmy that grabs an updated hash table periodically
Not a bad idea, but I was working on a project once that would support user uploaded images and looked into PhotoDNA, but it was an incredible pain in the ass to get access to. I'm surprised that someone hasn't realized that this should just be free and available. Kind of gross that it is put behind an application/paywall, imo. They're just hashes and a library to generate the hashes. Why shouldn't that just be open source and available through the NCMEC?
OK, I am going to take a minute away from the shit stirring and potentially provide some insight speaking as an admin who's had the misfortune of dealing with this so I can maybe shift this comment section into an actually meaningful discussion.
You can have your own opinion and feelings against lemmy.world but, this?
The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
This is correct. Most lemmy admins likely agree as well, I don't speak for anyone but myself but I can say that I think it would be hard to find someone who disagreed. What happened today is a result of a catastrophic failure on lemmys end, with issues that should have been addressed over a month ago just being completely ignored. The lemmy devs shared a roadmap during their AMA & they essentially were more concerned with making shit go faster... that's about it.
Okay, honest question. What mod tools are lacking. If there's something needed, what is that thing or things?
I went over to the feature request page for Lemmy and I couldn't find anything massive in terms of requests for moderation tools that would have been sure fire ways to stop this particular event.
That said, there is over 400 open feature requests alone on Lemmy's github. I obviously couldn't go through every single one. But coming from the kbin side I'm just curious about our Lemmy brothers and sisters. It sounds dire and I'm woefully under informed on how bad it is.
It was worded a harshly but I'm happy to see you jump in here @[email protected] <3
To users this might seem like it came out of the blue but instance admins know this is has been a big issue for months. The "roadmap" they shared was indeed, optimize the database queries to make things go brrrr, get more funding and update join-lemmy.org
I agree with @[email protected], if modtools (one of the reasons for Reddit API protests in the first place) aren't being prioritized, a hard fork of Lemmy will be inevitable. I know the Lemmy devs are known for being strangely hardheaded about certain issues.
Is there not some way to involve the authorities? I feel like FBI/CIA or other foreign agencies would love to track down whoever is distributing. Like set up some sort of honeypot instance to catch them
I'm a bit confused, how does locking down a single community help?
Are the spammers really just focusing on one community instead of switching to the next after it gets banned?
I do hope there is an IP ban option, so someone can't just use the same IP again to create an account on another instance and post CSAM from there. Obviously I do know about VPNs, but it makes it a tiny bit more difficult to spam in large amounts.
Most people don't have static IP addresses, so banning their IP will only stop them temporarily. Then whoever gets that dynamic IP address next will be banned too. Then there's CGNAT where 1 IP address can have up to 128 people using it at once and the address changes even more frequently.
We're talking about temporary bans here, which do work against spam. Private users do have dynamic IPs, but at home I think I've had the same IP for years. They don't wildly switch them around.
On second thought the IP is probably not federated though, so if there isn't a common IP block list which instances subscribe to it won't work.
Is it that hard to not be completely retarded and innapropriate on the internet for these people? Only "viable" alternative to reddit and they have to fuck it up
And I think its just some disgruntled online user who doesn't like when people are happy rather than some corpo entity. I've seen some people saying Reddit did this. I'm more likely to believe a user of a widely defederated instance that's shutting down because everyone defederated them is responsible, or a zealous fediverse user that refuses to touch Lemmy because of who the devs are and thinks theyre doing the world a favor by keeping anyone else from enjoying it
Definitely was. It was just a flex of their power. I don't see any viable solution at the moment though, so going nuclear was the only sane option. When your options are to close a door versus playing an increasingly difficult game of cat and mouse w/ CP posters, most would opt to temporarily shutter their doors I feel.
What is worrying is that any community on lemmy on any instance is vulnerable to this type of attack. This will continue happening again and again until a clear solution, technical or otherwise, can be devised.
I gave my loyalty to Lemmy. I am not going to jump shit because some deranged lunatics decide to troll in the most abhorrent ways. I plan on donating to the project in show of support and I hope others do as well.
Honestly, I think it was destined to happen one way or another because of an open-signups server getting so big. The burggit/vlemmy debacle was the warning shot.
It should jump-start overdue efforts to improve moderation granularity and make it easier for mods to manage users and content.
One solution, perhaps, is if Lemmy users were better able to overcome the inertia of moving Communities, Instances, accounts, etc. Essentially to be a moving target for anyone who might want to cause harm. DDoSing lemmy.world? Okay, but we're all on lemmy2.world now. Spamming a Community? Oh, you mean that one we all left?
I'm not criticizing others, because I'm as guilty of it any anyone, but it might be better if we realized that our usernames are meaningless, there's no Karma, our comment histories are full of ephemeral observations with only a very specific relevance. It wouldn't really matter if - worst case scenario - everything was deleted. I realise this wouldn't sound acceptable to new users, but since many of us on instances run by one person as a hobby, that might happen anyway.
(As I was typing this, someone just replied to a 17 days old comment I made, so maybe this is all rubbish)
The issue here is more than illegal content gets propagated to every instance, so moving around doesn't help that much in that regard, the issue would remain.
But, no, it does nothing for after something like this that has already happened. It was just more of a pie-in-the-sky solution to it ever happening in the first place.
How will you enforce this new "no unapproved fun" policy? I think "Only knowledge and education" is a dangerous precedent to set, and we should strive for freedom of expression. And I mean real freedom of expression, not the "mandatory audience" version of freedom of expression the freeze peach folks want, I mean actual honest to goodness freedom of expression with freedom of association, including "We no longer wish to associate with you."
Part of that is that we all must be respectful of the bodily and personal autonomy of all people, which requires moderation of content that does not respect bodily and personal autonomy.
That sounds very extreme. I like humor, but not the trolling type. In my time we used to say "don't feed the trolls". When ignored they mostly go away. Nowadays there's always someone arguing with them. It's so stupid...
The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
Because Lemmy is free and provided as is, nobody is obligated to do shit.
It would have been different if they simply pointed this out, but they specifically aimed this at the two people doing a ton of work for free making it available for everyone. That's simply rude and ungrateful, in my opinion.