It seems like, luckily, Reddthat wasn’t a victim of such (yet), but I think there should be some precaution applied here as well.
What is it about?
- Temporary Changes to our Sign-Up Policy (on Lemmy.world)
- Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice (on Lemmy.world)
- Image uploads are now disabled on lemm.ee due to malicious users (on Lemm.ee)
- lemm.ee plans for mitigating image upload abuse (on Lemm.ee)
- (and more…)
I am worried of such happening on our instance. Is anything planned?
Thank you for the insights and your opinion / decisions on this topic. Very much appreciated, especially by being so detailed.
I particularly looked for an instance which is open and doesn’t start restricting users (e.g. disabling image uploads) if anything happens, instead trust all moderators which invest a huge lot of time to keep communities safe and a nice place, even if not on this instance and only act when actually needed.
I agree with most you wrote about, sadly though such reports usually end up with no outcome since those (truly awful) trolls use TOR, VPN or any other available tool to hide their identity / IP from the public. Being an admin and moderator of several communities myself, I know this struggle. Luckily, on Lemmy there’s way more freedom / possibilities than on other managed platforms like Reddit or Discord.
Do you believe it might make sense to consider disabling local image caching (e.g. thumbnails coming from other instances) on your server or use any of the available tools to scan images for possible CSAM content and delete such cached content if this gets worse?
Out of interest, slightly related to this topic, how will you handle other instances possibly blocking Reddthat if ever any spambot attacks happen? Is there a strategy behind this, or will you simply act case by case if such ever happens?
My family comes first.
Absolutely, family and friends come first, especially for projects like this which isn’t your job / main income (if any ever from this project).
Thanks for your explanation and nice words for Reddthat.
Disabling local image cache results in a terrible experience especially with super big instances who are overloaded. While we may end up storing content from other services there is a timed purge feature where images are removed after x days. So I’m not worried about that.
Because once we remove the reported post we would no longer be serving the images because no-one would get the images.
We will take reasonable steps to ensure that all illegal content is removed from the platform in a timely manner. Such as actioning reports from users as soon as possible. There isn’t really any other way.
I doubt it will get worse as they have already got what they wanted. A huge reaction.
On the lighter note of us blocking instances we’ve already covered that here: https://reddthat.com/comment/371578
Basically if other instances block us for a reason I’m sure after reaching out and talking about it those instances will unblock us. Once we have sorted out the reason. No one wants to block other instances and it usually comes as a last resort.
It amounts to we will deal with it when it comes to it.
Monetary wise I want to eventually get some money from reddthat but currently we are just above breaking even with donations and hosting costs but I don’t want to just start taking money from the hard won donations.
Cheers!
Tiff
You can donate to Reddthat via our open collective here: https://opencollective.com/reddthat
Currently I’m not taking non-reddthat (personal) donations. I may in the future but I do not want to confuse the two. Even having a “support Lemmy” link I’m pretty sure has lost Reddthat donations. But I haven’t gone out of my way to fix it because it ends up helping all of Lemmy instances.
Thanks for even considering it.
PS. Make sure you read the sidebar on the homepage. It also links to our funding post where I outline what the money is for.
