Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

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: @Striker 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.

recapitated,

I understand this is a major growing problem in many parts of the tech industry right now.

Solving the problem will make us strong… I just wish it was over something like malware. Something urgent enough to make us work, but not awful enough… You know.

HawlSera,

Malware would be better for our sanity, Malware has less questions that challenge my sanity and my already low opinion of the world.

bemenaker,

I assume you’ve contacted the FBI, but if not PLEASE DO.

emergencyfood,

lemmy.world is based in Finland.

bemenaker,

Didn’t realize that. Thanks.

raptir,

Yes, the Finnish Bureau of Investigation

recapitated,

They’re the ones that can finish the job.

Dogs_cant_look_up,

The Finnish Bureau of Icecoldmotherfuckers

Bluetreefrog,

Gold!

SubArcticTundra,

In that case probably Europol or the Finnish police/cybersecurity agency or something?

El_illuminacho,

It’s always fun to see Americans assume the Internett is all American as well.

Moghul,

Threads on this issue have been posted both on Reddit and on Lemmy before, and despite Americans protesting that they don’t mean it or they don’t think that way, some people do actually say that in the comments. They assume everyone is American because “the internet is American” and “the website is American”.

What the fuck is “the bay area”?

ObviouslyNotBanana,
@ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world avatar

What the fuck is “the bay area”?

I assume that’s where the pirates are.

despotic_machine,
@despotic_machine@lemmy.world avatar

And the real estate sharks!

bemenaker,

What the fuck is “the bay area”?

The San Francisco Bay area, aka Silicone Valley, aka the BIRTHPLACE of computers. DARPA (US Military), created the internet, but when it was opened to public, again it was “The Bay Area” that made it usable to the world.

It has a little bit of importance to computing.

Moghul,

The point wasn’t that it’s not important, it’s that it’s so generic in name as to mean nothing to many outside of the US. The reason I mentioned it is because I have had to Google which bay area Americans refer to.

Consider me an alien confused about which moon you’re talking about when you say ‘the moon’

bemenaker,

Fair point. Yes Americans are ego centric in most cases. In my original comment that got everyone panties in bunch, was because most.of the tech companies and web hosting sites are in the US, or based here, giving US law enforcement jurisdiction. I didn’t know where lemmy.world.was based until someone in this thread told me.

obinice,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

Most people in the world don’t live in that one very specific country, it’s somewhat presumptuous to assume they do, and I’m a bit tired of those assumptions only ever coming from people from a very specific place.

I put up with it for a long while without saying anything, but it’s been 15 years and they’re doing it more now than ever. I’m kinda… worn down now.

Can’t we all just accept that the world is vast and amazing, and exists beyond our own borders? :-(

qjkxbmwvz,

It’s not a crazy leap of faith to assume Lemmy demographics are similar to reddit demographics, where the USA makes up the plurality by a huge margin statista.com/…/reddit-global-active-user-distribu…

Fedizen,

a lot of the fediverse is rooted in the EU so I’m not entirely sure the demographics are 1:1 with reddit.

Dark_Arc,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Can’t we all just accept that the world is vast and amazing, and exists beyond our own borders? :-(

So can I count on you to make sure every comment you make on social media doesn’t incorrectly reference the wrong country, culture, or generally get something wrong?

Y’all act like Americans just get up in the morning and say “to hell with it, everywhere is 'Merica.” The person just tried to help; hell they might not even be an American and just assumed (at least) one of the site admins is.

it’s been 15 years and they’re doing it more now than ever

The pure unnecessary drama over what’s easily a simple mistake is ridiculous. I can’t even comprehend why you even care? And beyond that, why not just tell this person “well actually, it’s X they should call because Y”?

Like this good egg dig … sh.itjust.works/comment/2716913

Redredme,

Yes. Everywhere I go Americans (and us Dutch) act like the entire world is theirs. (but I’m American! Or in case of us Dutch: ik zit hier en ik moet bier. En die bbq gaat niet uit. En techno moet hard.)

I more or less concur with the other guy. He said it in a shitty way though.

Problem is, there is no “world police”. ('obligatory: ’ MURICA FUCK YEAH!)

Calling the FBI, Essex police department, Clouseau’s Surete or even interpol will do jack shit in 99% of these cases because of the simple fact they don’t have any jurisdiction. Add to that they couldn’t care less because narcotics and gang violence are bigger problems and you end up with reality: it will only cost time and solve nothing. Why? Because IT crimes are hard and often times pricey to investigate with very little returns. (yeeeh, we arrested a 14 year old pimply faced youth, a minor so he will be out in 2 days with a slap on the wrist)

And finally: The FBI does not have global reach. This is a global platform.

tsz,

Wat betekent moet bier of moet hard?

Aceticon, (edited )

In this context:

“ik moet bier” - I need beer/I must have beer (literally “I must beer”)

“techno moet hard” - Techno (music) must (go) hard.

I vaguelly recognize this whole thing as a dutch saying. (Not dutch myself)

The pleasant wordplay in that saying is because “moet” there is used with two slightly different meanings, as “having need” and as “must”.

tsz,

Yeah I’ve just not seen moet alone like that. I like it lol.

Aceticon,

Well, the first form is a pretty common variant for human basic needs if you want to make it sound desperate in a funny way (for example, “ik moet voed” rather than “ik moet eten”) but the second whilst making sense is not common and was probably chosen for literally reasons (whilst not 100% sure, I think these might be lyrics from a dutch song).

Dark_Arc,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

And finally: The FBI does not have global reach. This is a global platform.

www.fbi.gov/contact-us/international-offices

wanderingmagus,

The FBI work hand in hand with the CIA, who can and do set up black sites all over the world for enhanced interrogation and extrajudicial detention, and work extremely closely with the Five Eyes and NATO. I’d call that global reach.

bemenaker,

The FBI does work with Interpol, and every national police agency the US is friendly with.

redexplosives,

It’s not that deep

bemenaker,

And most of the big tech companies are based where? And most of the big hosting services are based where? So, assuming contacting the US authorities makes sense I don’t know where lemmy.world is doing their hosting, but since most of the big providers are based in the US, and that would make it US jurisdiction, it isn’t an unreasonable assumption.

ObviouslyNotBanana, (edited )
@ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world avatar

They* should contact Europol.

cactusupyourbutt,

they should contact the local authorities thats the easiest probably

ObviouslyNotBanana,
@ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world avatar

Might be.

newIdentity,

They probably haven’t. Also they won’t do anything as long as you aren’t a large cooperation. Even if you are they might not do anything. See the Epic Games hack in the early 2000s

jivandabeast,

This is so fucked, but this brings up a question – is this something to be concerned about for instances federated with lemmy.world? As in, if something like this is uploaded to a community that the instance federates with, their instance will now have a copy as well?

can,

yes

Many instances deleted all pictures for the last 24-48h as a precaution or shut down entirely.

jivandabeast,

I hope it wasn’t any other communities other than lemmyshitpost, but I’m probably going to venture on better safe than sorry for this one.

can,

I’m probably going to avoid browsing new for a while.

douglasg14b,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

It definitely is I think.

Imagine being raided for CP and all you did was federate your hobby self-hosted instance to an instance it was posted in.

cubedsteaks,

I signed up for lemmy.today because its based out of the same state I’m in - I saw nothing and I’ve also never had lemmy go down which I see complaints about a lot as well.

MargotRobbie,

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.

It’s likely that we’ll be seeing a large number of instances switch to whitelist based federation instead of the current blacklist based one, especially for niche instances that does not want to deal with this at all (and I don’t blame them).

fuzzzerd,

Basically ruins the fediverse concept, as it will ultimately lock out all small instances of self hosted instances, which really is a shame.

MargotRobbie,

I don’t think it does, since self hosters can just federated with any number of instances they would like to interact with and not worry about the rest.

stewie3128,

Those instances would have to actively fedeate with the self-hosters though. Blacklist is better than whitelist - keep the internet open.

T156,

Although a blacklist also wouldn’t stop someone from firing up their instance, and posting CSAM to the bigger instances that way.

It’s a downside of the Federation model. If an instance is blacklisted, they could just shut it down, fire up a new one, and get around it that way.

pjhenry1216,

Whitelisting basically puts power in the hands of a few and suddenly the fediverse is capable of being bought. I’d prefer looking into other options if possible prior to essentially putting the nail in the coffin of an open fediverse.

T156,

That’s always the case, since people will automatically flock to the larger and more stable instances, and anyone who’s looking to buy in has the financial resources to build one of those.

It’s part of the reason why lemmy.world and lemmy.ml got so big, since they were the largest, and most active instances, which made them the most attractive places for new users to flock to.

For example, XMPP is an open standard, but it was effectively bought and shut down by Google when they opened up their Reader(?) service, and shut that down after a while. The service still exists, and you can fire up a new server/join one, but it’s dead for all other intents and purposes.

Lemmy isn’t any more resistant to that than XMPP was.

pjhenry1216,

Yeah, but notice that Google didn’t have to deal with the dark web or CSAM or ridiculous amounts of money to cover their purported tracks.

UnfortunateShort,

I mean, you could have some sort of application system and allow instances to pull from you by default. That way you’re “read only” until approved by other instances

uhmbah,

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

JustZ,

Have you reported this to the FBI?

snowe,
@snowe@programming.dev avatar

You don’t report it to the FBI. They need to register with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), where they will be given a login and then they report it through there. They also should make sure to not purge the CSAM as there are specific rules about removal.

Rentlar,

¿Por que no los dos?

ShroOmeric,

Not everyone is american. Thank god for that.

Ghostalmedia,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

The amount of people in these comments asking the mods not to cave is bonkers.

This isn’t Reddit. These are hobbyists without legal teams to a) fend off false allegations or b) comply with laws that they don’t have any deep understanding of.

obinice,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, you’ve got to think of this place like the big forums of 20 years ago, they’re just run by a tiny handful of regular people, and having to deal with solicitors and other such stuff is entirely out of the question.

If something’s bad, you lock it down and purge it until it’s not bad any more. Unfortunately that’s the best you can do with such minimal resources as a regular member of the public, and for those that don’t like it, there’s other forums out there.

This isn’t one single huge monopoly thing like Reddit, you either stay or leave forever, if you don’t like how one is being run, just sign up on a different one. Takes the stress out of it :-)

T156,

Lemmy instances are also international, which would cause more problems.

This instance is Finnish, and lemmy.ml is Malaysian(?), each with their own separate administration teams. Whereas Reddit knows that all of the Reddit servers are in a few known countries, and they have the capacity to make big changes across all of them as needed.

Zeth0s,

Server and url are not necessarily in the same location. Url is just a human friendly alias for the ip of a server that can be located anywhere

T156,

ml is Mali’s TLD. They reclaimed it recently, but the instance itself is hosted in Malaysia, if memory serves.

Lightsong,

What stops them from posting across other instances? I’m surprised they spam stuff in that specific instance instead of all over.

TalkingCat,

lemm.ee is also affected

GodzillaFanboy129,

There are posts on lemm.ee as well?

raptir,

No, any instance federated with lemmy.world that has users who are subscribed to LemmyShitpost are affected.

GodzillaFanboy129,

Ah I misunderstood, I thought they meant those assholes were posting CSAM over there. Not like it makes it any better due to the whole cache issue, but it always could be worse I guess.

can,

Because it’s already spreading to other instances via federation. This part of the problem and what they’re exploiting.

pleasemakesense,

Who the fuck has such a problem with this instance?

khannie,
@khannie@lemmy.world avatar

It’s a great question. What’s the motivation? Who loses if Lemmy succeeds?

Psythik,

Spez loses. Maybe he’s the one behind it cause he’s salty that people called him out for being a pedophile.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah it’s definitely a targeted campaign of sabotage. I’m glad people have found a way to stem the flow, but we’ll need a better solution long term.

pjhenry1216,

It’s highly unlikely. There are better, less CSAM ways for a company to make lemmy instances unstable. This is clearly for shock and troll value.

Psythik,

I know; I’m just being sarcastic. I didn’t think I had to pull out the /s here on Lemmy, cause everyone here seems more intelligent (for the most part).

pjhenry1216,

I’m going to assume you meant that you didn’t expect others to post the same sentiment alongside you unironically and not that anyone who replied to you seriously should have known better for literally no reason.

Transcendant,

It wouldn’t surprise me if an associate of reddit (or someone they hired at arms length) was responsible for the DDOS attacks, but I highly doubt reddit as a company is hiring anyone to spam CSAM.

Think about what sort of motivations and personality someone would have to do it. IMO it’s the guy who got butthurt over not being able to spam and threatened that he would wreck the site.

cyberpunk007,

Exactly.

obinice,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

Rivals such as Reddit, the groups who benefit from the ease at which they can manipulate what people see on Reddit to further their agendas (companies, governments, groups).

And fascists in general, who hate open global community platforms that are hard to control, and hate things that bring people together, things that give people strength to fight together against things bigger than them.

All it takes is one of those interested parties to fund a couple of low rent hackers to poke at Lemmy until it’s so unstable and untrustworthy that people stop using it.

Cheap and effective if done right, a good investment in the long run for any discerning fascist.

T156,

I doubt it would be company rivals for the time being. Lemmy is nowhere big enough, and even the largest instances are dwarfed by either other social networks, or other projects like Mastodon.

Reddit has much more of a concern for Facebook or Twitter trying to co-opt their model, than some small open source project, like how Meta released Threads during the recent Twitter controversy.

T156,

The motivation could also be just trying to get the instance shut down, or otherwise break it, like the user that was spamming communities not that long ago.

Nothing too conspiratorial.

leraje,
@leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t think either a corporate entity or another instance/software type is behind this. The motivation for these people is the same as those who used to post a certain image with the word ‘goat’ as part of the title all over usenet binary groups and web forums. They simply find it funny that so many people are appalled and they feel a sense of power that they’ve affected so large a community. There’s nothing more complicated than that to it.

gammasfor,

… I can think of one possibility - an instance known that lemmy.world recently defederated from.

STRIKINGdebate2, (edited )
@STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world avatar

The odds are no one. To the trolls this isn’t meant to be a personal attack against a server they don’t like. They just want to wreck havoc and cause shock to anywhere. It just so happens they discovered lemmy shit posting.

pleasemakesense,

I was thinking in combination with the ddos attack, personally I believe they’re the same people doing this, obviously not everybody will share that belief

cubedsteaks,

Yup. It’s this. This is the mentality behind trolling. The point is to antagonize people just to get a reaction. That’s all they care about. They want to do the most outrageous thing in a public space because they know people will respond and they think its funny when people react to anything they do.

People need to realize: They want to get banned. They want you to try and sit around figuring out why they’re doing this.

dipshit,

Step 1: Go on the internet and say some shit. Step 2: Get moderated off your favorite website. Step 3: RAGE

MsPenguinette,

Last week an explodingheads shithead kept posting racist (Also antisemitic etc etc) “memes”. People told them to get fucked. It was wonderful to see everyone be incredibly mean to the fucker.

If we know one thing about nazis, it’s that when they get busted for any crime, they always end up finding csam as well. So wouldn’t suprise me if some nazi got angry because they weren’t welcome here and cracked open his personal collection

pleasemakesense,

Huh, interesting. I was thinking hexbear because of the tianmen square post

J12,

Why would someone post that crap? If you’ve been banning and removing posts all day that seems like someone is malicious trying to do it to get Lemmy in trouble. I don’t know, just a guess but someone needs to go to prison for doing that.

aranym,

Ya’ll are going through one of the worst situations I could imagine, but I’m confident you will figure it out and come out better for it. Keep your heads up. (P.S. - Sorry about the scat, lol)

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

4chan.mov

Trekman10,
@Trekman10@sh.itjust.works avatar

Was wondering why I couldn’t reply to a comment from earlier today when I was sure I hadn’t broken any rule to get banned. Hope it’s back soon, but more importantly that you can stop all the damn CP.

malloc,

I’m gone for a few days and some assholes trying to fuck up this instance. Smh.

Swim,

Correction, fkd the instance

ComfortablyGlum,

Thank you so much for all of the effort and time all of you are putting into this situation. Having to deal with bad actors is one thing, but you are now dealing with images that are traumatizing to view.

Please, for your sanity and overall well being, PLEASE take care of yourself. Yes, it sucks about having to close !lemmyshitpost, but self-care and support are of the utmost importance.

StrawberryCream,

Facts! Self care and mental health is something that’s truly important these days.

tallwookie,
@tallwookie@lemmy.world avatar

wow that’s fucked, but thanks for the transparency

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