this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that's extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.
It doesn't bode well.
Lemmy is new for all of us. I don't see any other solution right now. You got some ideas how to handle it better?
I think better mod tools are needed but it will take time. Doesn't mean the platform will die, but means we may have to deal with some stuff like this.
It's a hard problem but it absolutely is an existential risk. Spam is an existential risk. A platform that collapses under spam will either remain too small to be irrelevant or collapse from unusability. I'm sorry but I don't think your response completely grasps the number of forums, social media sites, wikis, etc. that have been completely crushed by spam.
I admit I haven't kept track of that, true.
Solution now. Better solution later.
That's what I'm hoping - we can't just burn down any community with spam
I’ve just finished arguing with other lemmy users about how admins aren’t interested in taking on your legal risk. That was for the topic of piracy. CSAM is another issue entirely. Not only can lemmy users not expect to see a CSAM-friendly instance, lemmy users should expect to be deanonymized by law enforcement. Fuck around with kids and find out.
Downvote this message if you are a pedophile, as I’m taking the stance that CSAM should not be allowed on lemmy servers.
Are you seriously conflating my position with arguing that CSAM should be allowed?
Are people having a difficult time reading today? It’s not just you. Maybe it’s this topic and how it intermeshes with technology. Some people seem to think that there’s a technical solution for this already (one that works as well if not better than human moderators).
No, I don’t think you personally are advocating for CSAM to be allowed. I think commenters are getting a little uppity about missing out on their favorite community while the admins deal with content that is:
Imagine you owned an instance, and you found 100 moderators for your communities. You rest your head on the pillow and go to sleep. You wake up and find that some user has written a script to post CSAM on all your communities, because “fuck you that’s why”. You get on the line with your moderators and they tell you they’ve been battling this all night, just banning people and deleting comments on site. They tell you they’ve had to turn off a few communities and that some users are complaining. Your hard work for weeks and months to get this instance to a healthy place is being tested. You get an email from your hosting service, saying that they have reports that your site contains CSAM and that’s against ToS - they give you a day to get it under control before they boot your server or turn it over to police. Imagine in this case you make the drastic move to simply pull the plug - taking the entire instance offline until you can sort it through. Now imagine some users come in and start complaining about how you dear admin are killing the fediverse. Personally, I have no sympathy for those user who complain about their community or instance being taken offline while admins deal with real shit.
What praytell the fuck do you mean by this term specifically
I’ve spent the better part of this morning explaining to people the fact that a community needs to be shut down in order for volunteers to work on cleaning it up in the time they have available.
commenters seem to be pretty upset that something as “drastic” as turning off a community needs to be done. Some commenters have gone so far as to say that the policy of turning off communities in response to handling CSAM is what will “kill the fediverse”.
I think the normal response to this is: “Wow, this sucks. Thanks admins for doing your best work. I understand the community make not come back for a bit, take all the time you need!”. Yet, I hear “it’s the dev’s fault for not putting in the code for blocking CSAM and taking a community offline is unacceptable”. I call that “upity” but there’s probably better words for it.
So 4chan has this problem a lot but they are also based in the US where its most definitely illegal and they IP ban people and I think for the most part it works. It did suck though - I don't go on there anymore but in the last few years I did, if I was on mobile, I would often get hit with a region ban because so many people in that area were banned that they just decided to block an entire IP region to prevent anyone else posting illegal content.
maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.
I don't think the comment above was trying to express dissatisfaction towards Lemmy's hosts for failure to respond. They're simply stating that the way things are all set up, much as we might like it, has serious problems - ones that may end up being considered unsolvable. As you said, we might be heading for an eventual plug pull.
It's like pointing out that cars produce fossil fuel exhaust. It sucks, and we're seeing it as unsustainable, but there's no convenient alternative yet.