They also shut down registration
Whoever is spamming CP deserves the woodchipper
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.
Honestly dude if you believe this is true you should speak with a therapist.
Why would a guy who called their free labor “landed gentry” and thinks Elon Musk is running the site formerly known as twitter well, not go after where a shit ton of his content creators went? It’s stupid enough to be him, lol.
If you believe businesspeople never commit crimes to shut down their competition, you should read some history books. Antitrust violations, murders, aerial bombings—you name it, and if it’s illegal and gives a business an advantage over its competition, it’s happened.
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.
It’s okay. Thank you for the support. They seemed quick to complain and kinda organized to be this deep in some obscure comment thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks
And, agreed about the DDoS attacks.
The comment was more about inspiring a pro-fediverse angle, in any case. Imagine defending reddit, here of all places.
These comments so far stink, yall are something else.
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.
There aren’t enough roles. There’s admin, moderator, and user, but it would be best to have tiers of user in between. Reports go to 4 categories of user when you file a report. Report a comment for violating a fun rule your community decided to implement (all post titles must contain “Jon Bois Rules!”)? That report goes to: the community moderators (good), the community’s host instance’s admin (bad), your instance’s admin (bad), the user who posted the “offending post”'s instance’s admin (bad).
Only admins can permanently remove illegal content. If a mod “removes” it, it still sits visible to all in modlog, and for the purposes of CSAM specifically, that counts as distribution which is prosecuted as a worse crime than possession. Federation with other instances is effectively binary. You can or cannot federate, you cannot set traffic as unidirectional like you can on most other fediverse platforms. The modlogs make it hard to parse who the moderator performing an action is acting on the behalf of. Was it a community mod? An admin? Your admin?
There’s more but my phone is getting low on battery
Agreed, I don’t know what AutoMod did on Reddit but if what mods need is a rule-configurable post remover then I’d be happy to clobber together something in Python
Here’s some things Beehaw admind have been asking for from moderation since June: https://beehaw.org/comment/397674
As an admin, how do kbin moderation tools compare?
Also does lemmy.world have the spare cash to offer cash for features?
I don’t know this for sure, but I have a feeling that a hard fork is in Lemmy’s future. I don’t want to get super into it, but programming is a form of communication. What features you bake into a platform are reflective of the messages you want to propogate on that platform. Lemmy’s devs vision for what the platform should be might not be reflective of what most of us might think it should be. The moderation tools might not be a focus for a while, even if most of us view that as the greatest need
It was worded a harshly but I’m happy to see you jump in here @gabe@literature.cafe <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
100%, ultimately there might be disagreements amongst admins over many things but this is something that there is clear unity on and I felt important to establish it. Hell, I’ve disagreed with lemmy.world’s decisions on numerous fronts as well which you already know. I think the harshness is understandable as well, given you know
With all forks of maintained projects it starts with saying several times “No, but seriously, you need to do something about this”
Forks are the enemy of open source. The goal is merges. When someone forks a project without plans to merge back, it’s a sign that the project has failed them in some way
It’s a shame it’s not written in a PHP framework or something that’s more common. Plenty of devs have been helping about contributing to kbin development, it sounds like it’s a lack of manpower on Lemmy’s end that’s contributing to this
It is, there are currently discussions of attempting to do so but the issue lies that Rust is not only a really new programming language that really never was well suited for an application like this, forking means nothing if no one is going to contribute to the fork in the first place. I know that pawb.social is working on a fork iirc
Got a link to this AMA? Couldn’t find it.
I agree with @Cube6392@beehaw.org, 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.
They have shifted gears recently and been pretty receptive to this major critique. Things are going in a much better direction now that 2 months have passed. If I can find the AMA I will link you.
Looks like some CSAM fuzzy hashing would go a long way to catch someone trying to submit that kind of content if each uploaded image is scanned.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/
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?
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
They probably connect using tor. Not much you can do with that information (without effort far exceeding the value of one CP spammer).
ssssh… if they start arresting CP posters then people would lose faith in the Tor network and stop doing their illegal activities there.
Well the NSA did develop TOR so it wouldn’t be surprising if they did. It’s not like the NAS doesn’t break their own laws
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.
Every time my router restarts I get a fresh wan IP. I can also manually grab a new one via the DHCP release/renew functions in it’s config page.
MAC address is a Level 2 addressing system (OSI model) and will not leave the local network / stay within the broadcast domain. The web browser will not expose this kind of information to a web server.
MAC address isn’t something a remote server knows about a client. Only the IP you should respond to is provided.
