I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I’m able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it’s being blocked.
I understand that some limitations are necessary to prevent spam and other abuse, however this is a very blunt instrument. The fact that I have a 10 month old account with consistent activity should outweigh any IP address reputation issues.
Perhaps the VPN limitations could be narrowed in scope to cover only account creation and posts from young accounts.
We activated that rule after the acute CSAM attacks, and many used vpns, and after we did this the CSAM posts dropped.
Everybody in vpn is blocked to post comments or create posts. Not depending on account age.
We are NOT a dark web service where everyone needs to be under tor, vpn, proxy, and back again. We are an public service.
Please, imagine you are a instance hoster, you have either to choose csam ( and legal issues ) or users cant use VPNs.
ISPs in some parts of the world spy on users to, for example sell their browsing habits to advertisers and data brokers. That’s a good motivation for some people to browse via VPN by default, not to enable it only when accessing specific sites.
Most people dont understand that vpn providers can and will do that too ( even paid ones ) track you, log you and sell that. So yeah both sides track you.
That’s definitely a concern. I selected my provider (Mullvad) because I know someone who worked there, and I have fairly high confidence they don’t do that.
Instance admins chose to block vpns simply because of mullvad and then increased liability, because if there is comming a malicious actor through mulvad and they dont have any logs all liability goes to the instance admin, and then gets questions “Why didnt you just blocked vpns?” etc. etc.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the legal situation at least for the US and EU. Platform immunity and safe harbor provisions are pretty strong in those jurisdictions, and the fact that the trail goes cold with the IP address (because it’s a non-logging VPN) does not shift liability back to the platform operator.
But then still the questions comes up “Why didnt you blocked vpns? or TOR?” we will be not the main liability holder, but we will be accountable for those accidents.
An investigator asking a question is not liability, and I don’t believe any of the safe harbor or platform immunity laws in the EU or USA condition their protections on denying service to users from IP addresses belonging to providers that don’t provide a certain level of assistance to law enforcement. I’m nearly certain you can’t get in any kind of legal trouble for not blocking privacy-protecting services like Mullvad.
That’s separate from the operational concern: you don’t want people to post CSAM. I don’t want people to post CSAM. Nearly everyone else doesn’t want people to post CSAM, and most of us are willing to accept some level of inconvenience so that you can prevent or limit it. That said, once Lemmy offers more fine-grained tools, I hope lemmy.world will adopt a more fine-grained policy.
We still want to be on the safe side as we all arent lawyers ( and we dont have much money for it ).
And in the end we will see where mod tools go on lemmy.
Aren’t there alternatives that could be as effective especially when stacked together? dbzer0 requires users to fill out an application with the following
and have a verified email address before it’s processed.
I think the instance owner has also been developing something to prevent CSAM attacks.
I get Lemmy.world is massive and verifying accounts might be a struggle but I feel like the initial hurdle for new users might be worth it. Even if they are forced to wait a bit.
We get a little bit more registrations in an hour than db0 has in a day, thats the reason why we dont do manual registrations.
Yes he does, and we are using it already, but its just his one is for after incident cleanup ( ALREADY BAD ) and the vpn is to stop/reduce that even happen.
But thanks for your suggestions, we sadly cant apply them fully.
Nah dude, I’m not advocating to be havin to deal with they csam bullshit.
It’s the main thing we have zero tolerance for on our instance HC.
It’s the primary reason we were not federating in the first place.
So no I don’t expect anyone to put themselves legally at risk for a hobby that doesn’t pay your bills just so I can post my poop and fart questions on shitty ask hilariouschaos lol
But I’m gunna level with you though.
I don’t trust the intentions of most instance admins.
There’s this veil of secrecy and sneakiness there that I just don’t appreciate.
It’s not a way that myself and our server admin operate.
We’re always straight up and 100% transparent as fuck no matter what till the end. We have no issue telling our users what’s going on and how stuff works if they have questions or if there’s any changes. I’m not saying that to talk shit on you. I’m saying it’s what I don’t see from some other instances.
And I get that you have to protect yourself that is true yes of course.
I’m just trying to explain why I asked you that question in the first place.
I’m not going to tell you how to run your shit, cuz I wouldn’t like it if you told me that LOL haha but there’s a huge benefit to being unapologetically brutally honest and straightforward and up front.
I don’t know I just feel like there’s some hidden agenda something just doesn’t sit well with me with some other instance admins. So I’m very skeptical and wonder what they’re up to.
It’s just really fucking weird anyway I hope y’all figure out your stuff.
Thanks for responding
Its the curso of a big instance, we announce stuff gets shit on, doesnt announce it gets shit on, makes a vote gets shit on, makes a friendly survey gets shit on.
We are still trying to announce most of the stuff we do but, some things would have been announcement back and forth because we activated and deactivated one of our harder rules.
Yea, sounds like a rock and hard place for sure. Don’t let it bother you anymore so much. There’s only so much you can do, and you can’t please everyone.
I feel like lemmy can kinda become a bit of a whole you get sucked into at times.
Happens to me sometimes. Take a break and step away for a little breather when that happens.
I know it’s hard to do trust me. I’m addicted to technology so I’ll be the first to tell you ha ha
But yea don’t stress yourself out. It’ll be alright