Reddthat Update - September 2023
Reddthat Update - September 2023
Hello Reddthat,
It has been a while since I posted a general update, so here we go!
Slight content warning regarding this post. If you don't want to read depressing things, skip to # On a lighter note.
The week of issues
If you are not aware, the last week(s) or so has been a tough one for me & all other Lemmy admins. With recent attacks of users posting CSAM, a lot of us admins have been feeling a wealth of pressure.
Starting to be familiar with the local laws surrounding our instances as well as being completely underwhelmed with the Lemmy admin tools. All of these issues are a first for Lemmy and the tools do not exist in a way that enable us to respond fast enough or in a way in which content moderation can be effective.
If it happens on another instance it still affects everyone, as it effects every fediverse instance that you federate against.
As this made "Lemmy" news it resulted in Reddthat users asking valid questions on our [email protected]. I responded with the plan I have if we end up getting targeted for CSAM. At this point in time a user chose violence upon waking up and started to antagonise me for having a plan. This user is a known Lemmy Administrator of another instance. They instigated a GDPR request for their information. While I have no issue with their GDPR instigation, I have an issue with them being antagonising, abusive, and
Alternatively, stop attracting attention you fuckhead; a spineless admin saying “I’m Batman” is exactly how you get people to mess with you
Unfortunately they chose to create multiple accounts to abuse us further. This is not conduct that is conducive for conversation nor is it conduct fitting of a Lemmy admin either. As a result we have now de-federated from the instance under the control of that admin.
To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.
This will hopefully help them understand what is and isn't acceptable conduct while they are on Reddthat.
On a lighter note
Stability
Server stability has been fixed by our hosting provider and a benefit is that we've been migrated to newer infrastructure. What this does for our vCPU is yet to be determined but we have benefited and have confirmed our status monitoring service (over here) is working perfectly and is detecting and alerting me.
Funding
Donations on a monthly basis are now completely covering our monthly costs! I can't thank you enough for these as it really does help keep the lights on.
In August we had 4 new donators, all recurring as well! Thank you so much!
Merch / Site Redesign
I would like to offer merchandise for those who want a hoody, mouse pad, stickers, etc.
Unfortunately I am a backend person, not a graphics designer. Thus if anyone would like to make some designs please let me know in the comments below. 🧡 An example:
I am thinking we need at least 3+ design choices:
- The Logo itself (Sticker/Phone/Magnet)
- Logo with Reddthat text
- Logo with
Where You've Truly 'ReddThat'! - Something cool that you would want on a hoody. <- Very important!
I've managed to find some on-demand printing services which will allow you to purchase directly through them and have it shipped directly from a local-ish printing facilities.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes you to get your merch, reduce the costs of shipping and hopefully ensure I know as little as possible about you as I can. If all goes to plan, I won't know about your addresses / payments / etc and everyone can have some cool merch!
New Admins
To help combat the spamming issue, the increase of reports and the new approval system I am looking for some new administrators to join the team.
While I do not expect you to do everything I do, an hour or two a day in your respective timezone, which amounts to randomly opening reddthat a couple times a day. Checking in to confirm everything is still hunky-dory is probably the minimum.
If you would like to apply to being an Admin to help us all out, please PM me with your approval answering the following questions:
Reason for your application:
Timezone:
Time you could allocate a day (estimate):
What you think you could bring to the team:
I am thinking we'll need about 6 admins to have full coverage around the globe and ensure that everyone will not be burnt out after a week! So even if you see a new admin pop up in the sidebar don't worry, there is always room for more!
Parting words
Thank you for those who have reached out and gave help. Thank you to the other Lemmy admins who helped me, and thank you everyone on Reddthat for still being here and enjoying our time together.
Cheers,
Tiff
tldr
- We have now defederated from our first instance :(
- Signups now are via Application process
- We had 4 new people join our recurring donations last month! 💛
- Merch is in the works. If you have some design skills please submit your designs in the comments!
- Admin recruitment drive
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The application processes can be “gamed”. They could create an account and sit on it or even wait 30days and then flood it with csam. There is no way for me to tell if a user has good or bad intentions unless I make people write a paragraph of text, even then it can easily be gamed.
Even lemmyworld has had other troll account issues. Ban a person, they signup again with another random email account and start spamming again. The features for anti-spam are not built into Lemmy like they are with Reddit. It’s only been 90days since I bought reddthat.com and less than 60 since we had a huge influx.
What the other server admins have done will not change the fact that out of the 1000 servers with open signups, federation of posts is still an issue and actually won’t “save” them from having to deal with it. Sure it won’t be because of a user on their instance, it will just be a user from another instance posting content to their instance.
(from https://reddthat.com/comment/2314735)
someone says mean things on the internet
To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.
I know! It could almost be deduced that I am a hypocrite.
The tools I have at my disposal are limited to combatting spam, or combating aggressive signups. At the end of the day they did not say a mean thing, they said a lot of mean things and then created 3 extra accounts to abuse further.
The downsides I list in my previous posts are not going to magically go away. There are still going to be here. But I think that having required reading where it states what constitutes acceptable interactions and a little about reddthat will in the end, be a benefit to us.
When you are an instance admin you do not have leeway to mouth off, resort to violence or abuse the system. This person did all three. Of course they can easily sidestep and signup elsewhere and interact with us, but we will come to that later.
We are held to a higher stance. An admin is the embodiment of the instance. If I resort to violence then it allows everyone of our instance to do so.For example I really want to have fun & make jokes/puns/comedy. Like:
joke about your account
create an account and ... wait 30days
Account is 2 months old with 1 comment 😜.
I'm glad I got you to come out of your shell!!But some could call this bad taste, not find it funny or in jest, or you could take it as a personal attack when it was never meant to be one! Situational comedy is not for everyone.
I cannot do this at all because situationally it will result in reports which means more work for me or a host of users migrating and reddthat dying. Or everyone taking it a step further insulting everyone and calling it jokes. There is a time and place for everything. Terrible jokes/non jokes from instance admins are best not allowed.It's been a hard week, maybe the instance admins are all on edge, maybe I acted too harsh, maybe there was a better way to do it. What I didn't include is that after chatting with others on the Lemmy matrix with other admins they too have had unwelcomed interactions with this person. These all fed into how I decided to handle it.
We shall find out if it was the best course of action but the only thing we can all do is move forward, enjoy our time here and relish in people we might call friend.
I’m glad I got you to come out of your shell!!
Neah ill just go back to lurking