Sorry for the short post, I’m not able to make it nice with full context at the moment, but I want to quickly get this announcement out to prevent confusion:
Unfortunately, people are uploading child sexual abuse images on some instances (apparently as a form of attack against Lemmy). I am taking some steps to prevent such content from making it onto lemm.ee servers. As one preventative measure, I am disabling all image uploads on lemm.ee until further notice - this is to ensure that lemm.ee can not be used as gateway to spread CSAM into the network.
It will not possible to upload any new avatars or banners while this limit is in effect.
I’m really sorry for the disruption, it’s a necessary trade-off for now until we figure out the way forward.
This is sick. Kudos to mods for dealing with this garbage. I hope the posters are all hunted down and punished.
Yeah, the admins deserve all our support on this. Not only to protect themselves as server owners, but to stop the spread. Hopefully a longterm solution will be found soon
I think this is a great move until we have something rock solid to prevent this. There are tons of image hosting sites you can use (most of which have the resources to already try to prevent this stuff) so it shouldn’t really cause much inconvenience.
Quality of posts will go up too. There’s a direct correlation with (worse) quality and image posts.
I’m sorry that you and the people on this instance are being subjected to that shit. It’s always despicable but on top of that it just seems absurd to target lemm.ee – a deliberately unprofitable platform – with such illegal means.
And I’m honestly sorry that people are blaming & attacking you and various other Hexbear users for no tangible reason.
I’m surprised people have forgotten already about the attacks against lemmy.world, assumedly executed by a disgruntled ex-moderator long before we ever knew Hexbear existed.
Instead people are jumping to “OhH it’s ThE HexBeArS” when they have not been able to freely browse HB discussions or even talk with you, they’re just shown the worst take from a minority (although tbf HB does the same on c/cth, so it’s kinda funny seeing both sides with one not realising the other is also just a human too, just with differing culture and political stance)
Edit: replaced “guys” with a more neutral term
Thankfully I haven’t seen the takes accusing HB of the recent attacks, though being accused of the attacks on .world was a little annoying. I appreciate the solidarity.
I genuinely have no idea where this recent attack is coming from. The most fried part of my brain says “One of the big companies trying to absorb the fediverse is doing this to undermine their competition,” but I have zero evidence, it’s just the only motive I can even think of beyond it being a rogue crank.
It’s totally conceivable that HB people would spam an instance they don’t like – though this would be against the wishes of the mods and admins – but our site culture is completely antithetical to spamming CSAM and things like that, so I don’t think even a rogue group of users would do it “on our behalf”.
Oh, I just realized it could be one of those fash instances like exploding heads. If any were defeded relatively recently, that would make sense.
Instead people are jumping to “OhH it’s ThE HexBeArS” when they have not been able to freely browse you guys’ discussions or even talk with you, they’re just shown the worst take from a minority (although tbf you guys do the same on c/cth, so it’s kinda funny seeing both sides with one not realising the other is also just a human too, just with differing culture and political stance)
I don’t think I have much to contribute to the “both sides” thing that is useful, but I’m going to talk anyway because I’m thinking about it now.
off-topic
I think if you asked a hexbear user to seriously answer how representative those screenshots are of lemm.ee, they’d probably say that lemm.ee is much more ideologically disjointed on a handful of issues, especially regarding history and geopolitics, and the screenshots are only representative of some of the more annoying tendencies among the neoliberals and poorly-educated “anarchists” (like that dude who decried “tankies” and used Sankara as a counterexample, when we all like Sankara). I also think they would be correct in saying this. I don’t know what the anti-HB people who don’t comment on our instance think, I hardly ever see it, but I can at least tell you that we know much more about neoliberal ideology than they do ML, because we almost all started out as de facto neoliberals and nearly none of them have even a basic understanding of ML theory (which is not really their fault, to be clear).
Anyone on any instance federated with hexbear is welcome to post questions to c/askchapo. If they are relatively polite and not presumptuous, we’ll be happy to answer. If people are still mean, report it. You can let me know and I will personally nag the mods to address the matter properly. Just recently we had a thread from a .ml user who wanted us to state our opinion on Trump for the record for the hundredth time, so about a hundred users chimed in that they all hate his guts (I also made a comment to that effect). We’re happy to discuss things openly and it would be good for us to improve community relations to avoid things like one group accusing the other of doing something as heinous as what the OP describes.
CSAM sourcing?
Where do these people get that much CSAM. somebody once said that to the best of their understanding, it was new CSAM images each time, meaning not many repeats. My collection of reddit memes costs me ~15-30GB, all of sbubby costs ~5GB. where is it pooled from?
The most fried part of my brain says “One of the big companies trying to absorb the fediverse is doing this to undermine their competition,” but I have zero evidence
Most companies that build CSAM detectors, by nature of their work, have a lot of it. likely thousands of photos and videos were willingly handed over to put into some vault to fight against it’s existance. If its a large corperation attacking is, it nesisarly means a leak from a CSAM vault wether it was intentional (an authorized attack) or not (opsec mistakes or insiders). Or it means there was no vault (negligence) or it wasnt tranfered securely (opsec mistakes).
it’s just the only motive I can even think of beyond it being a rogue crank.
Its not hard to build a bot that scrapes a webpage of its images, they can easly aggrogate that much content over decades.
trump
To be fair, some of the rhetoric you all use makes your political compass difficult to navigate.
We had to deal with something similar on lemmygrad a while ago. All power to you for destroying these annoying bastards.
We doubled the amount of mods, and banned anything remotely resembling the things on-site. Sadly many times it had to be a brave lemmygrad to check it first and take the bullet for us to report it. I was one of those people on several occasions. I still cringe at the memories. It lasted a few months iirc.I haven’t seen whatever is hitting you guys, but our bots had some recognizable features, usually hiding their spam behind spoilers or links.
It really was just a mobilization, lockdown, and purging everything that was suspicious until it stopped. That or they found a way to block those bots. I wasn’t in the command center by any means so the internal decisions I don’t know too much about.
condolences for having to deal with this and full support of your actions.