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 keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

  • @khannie
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    3110 months ago

    It’s a great question. What’s the motivation? Who loses if Lemmy succeeds?

    • @[email protected]
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      1310 months ago

      Spez loses. Maybe he’s the one behind it cause he’s salty that people called him out for being a pedophile.

      • @[email protected]
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        1010 months ago

        Yeah it’s definitely a targeted campaign of sabotage. I’m glad people have found a way to stem the flow, but we’ll need a better solution long term.

      • Bleeping Lobster
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        410 months ago

        It wouldn’t surprise me if an associate of reddit (or someone they hired at arms length) was responsible for the DDOS attacks, but I highly doubt reddit as a company is hiring anyone to spam CSAM.

        Think about what sort of motivations and personality someone would have to do it. IMO it’s the guy who got butthurt over not being able to spam and threatened that he would wreck the site.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          I know; I’m just being sarcastic. I didn’t think I had to pull out the /s here on Lemmy, cause everyone here seems more intelligent (for the most part).

    • Obinice
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      1310 months ago

      Rivals such as Reddit, the groups who benefit from the ease at which they can manipulate what people see on Reddit to further their agendas (companies, governments, groups).

      And fascists in general, who hate open global community platforms that are hard to control, and hate things that bring people together, things that give people strength to fight together against things bigger than them.

      All it takes is one of those interested parties to fund a couple of low rent hackers to poke at Lemmy until it’s so unstable and untrustworthy that people stop using it.

      Cheap and effective if done right, a good investment in the long run for any discerning fascist.

      • @T156
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        1010 months ago

        I doubt it would be company rivals for the time being. Lemmy is nowhere big enough, and even the largest instances are dwarfed by either other social networks, or other projects like Mastodon.

        Reddit has much more of a concern for Facebook or Twitter trying to co-opt their model, than some small open source project, like how Meta released Threads during the recent Twitter controversy.

    • @T156
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      10 months ago

      The motivation could also be just trying to get the instance shut down, or otherwise break it, like the user that was spamming communities not that long ago.

      Nothing too conspiratorial.

    • Leraje
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      510 months ago

      I don’t think either a corporate entity or another instance/software type is behind this. The motivation for these people is the same as those who used to post a certain image with the word ‘goat’ as part of the title all over usenet binary groups and web forums. They simply find it funny that so many people are appalled and they feel a sense of power that they’ve affected so large a community. There’s nothing more complicated than that to it.