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.
To me this is a flaw of federation in general and I really think the solution should be to defederate yourselves from other instances until further notice, and only federate with trusted communities.
With how Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is currently set up, what’s stopping malicious actors from just creating another Lemmy instance of their own then targeting another community until you’re forced to close that one like you did with Lemmyshitpost.
I mean, you have a point, of course, but the aim of these digital terrorists is precisely to take Lemmy down. These attacks are happening across many different instances and the long-term solution cannot just be to give up.
But if all the instances work together on a federated solution, we might have a chance to keep Lemmy alive long enough that a) this sort of thing will naturally die down, and b) the collective efforts will allow bad actors to be identified and stopped no matter where they’re coming from.
Don’t forget this happens with sites like Facebook and reddit but they pay people to clean up and sweep it under the rug. At least the visibility shines light on the problem.