It was brought to my attention by the staff of another instance that there has been a case of illegal images being posted on another Lemmy instance. Unfortunately, due to the way Lemmy works, this means it’s highly likely that this content was copied (at least in thumbnail form) across the Lemmyverse. This means there is a serious risk that this content now exists on all Lemmy instances.

I want to reiterate that nobody on Federate.cc was involved in any illegal activity, but as Lemmy is designed to broadcast content across the web to all the other Lemmy instances, we were likely affected through no fault of our own.

Lemmy currently has no effective admin UI for auditing posts or removing their associated image content, and I was unable to track any specific offending content down in our object store - given it’s got 51GB of images with random UUID filenames. Although the other instances’ admins are aware of only a few such offending files, the reality is that nobody seems to actually know how prevalent the problem was, thus even if I did manage to track down the particular handful of offending links, I can’t be sure that we got it all.

So unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution, and given the legal jeopardy this poses, I am forced to take the most drastic possible action, which is to blow away the entire image store. Consider this a complete core ejection - all the thumbnails on this instance will shortly be gone, likely your avatars along with them. You can go ahead and re-upload an avatar and you should be good.

Going forward, posts made after today will again receive thumbnails. Any posts from before this one won’t have thumbnails any more, but if you click into them, ought to still have their actual image content, as 99.9% of these are hosted elsewhere on other Lemmy instances anyway.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused, but the alleged nature of the images is so bad as to be too great a risk. To protect both our userbase and myself as the server operator, I have no choice but to blow it all away.

Thanks for your understanding

-s