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.
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.
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.
Things are setup the way they are because it’s the best way that admins (not just of lemmy instances but of major sites like reddit and facebook) have found to handle these situations.
You could take it a step further and give law enforcement their own backdoor to your site, as Facebook has done, but I would not advocate for that solution. We are in a special place in the internet where we can somewhat self-police our own content, assuming we actually self-police our own content. The way we do this is the way these admins are currently handling this.
It may be reasonable to think that sites like reddit and facebook have it all figured out, but all they have is similar code to what lemmy has, but with a bit more money to pay some content moderators on trust and safety to actually remove this content before users get a chance to see it. The difference between those sites and lemmy is $$$ and that’s not something that’s likely to change anytime soon.