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.
It’s likely that we’ll be seeing a large number of instances switch to whitelist based federation instead of the current blacklist based one, especially for niche instances that does not want to deal with this at all (and I don’t blame them).
Basically ruins the fediverse concept, as it will ultimately lock out all small instances of self hosted instances, which really is a shame.
I mean, you could have some sort of application system and allow instances to pull from you by default. That way you’re “read only” until approved by other instances
Sounds a lot like email where it is really difficult to self-host your own email server since you’ll be flagged as spam. It seemed like something that would happen to Lemmy eventually, but I didn’t think it would be a strong possibility this soon.
I don’t think it does, since self hosters can just federated with any number of instances they would like to interact with and not worry about the rest.
Those instances would have to actively fedeate with the self-hosters though. Blacklist is better than whitelist - keep the internet open.
Although a blacklist also wouldn’t stop someone from firing up their instance, and posting CSAM to the bigger instances that way.
It’s a downside of the Federation model. If an instance is blacklisted, they could just shut it down, fire up a new one, and get around it that way.
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That’s always the case, since people will automatically flock to the larger and more stable instances, and anyone who’s looking to buy in has the financial resources to build one of those.
It’s part of the reason why lemmy.world and lemmy.ml got so big, since they were the largest, and most active instances, which made them the most attractive places for new users to flock to.
For example, XMPP is an open standard, but it was effectively bought and shut down by Google when they opened up their Reader(?) service, and shut that down after a while. The service still exists, and you can fire up a new server/join one, but it’s dead for all other intents and purposes.
Lemmy isn’t any more resistant to that than XMPP was.
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