cross-posted from: https://jamie.moe/post/113630

There have been users spamming CSAM content in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world causing it to federate to other instances. If your instance is subscribed to this community, you should take action to rectify it immediately. I recommend performing a hard delete via command line on the server.

I deleted every image from the past 24 hours personally, using the following command: sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs/files -type f -ctime -1 -exec shred {} \;

Note: Your local jurisdiction may impose a duty to report or other obligations. Check with these, but always prioritize ensuring that the content does not continue to be served.

Update

Apparently the Lemmy Shitpost community is shut down as of now.

151 points

Someone is trying really hard to hurt Lemmy by continually attacking the most popular instance. Is this all coming from right-wingers upset that their nazi instances were defederated across basically the whole fediverse?

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125 points

The simplest explanation is 4chan types just doing it for the lulz.

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15 points

Could be, I’m surprised /g/ didn’t create an instance

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22 points

Their knowledge stops at creating sway screenshots.

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6 points

I’m sure someone’s already created a logo. But, that’s as far as they ever get.

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57 points

My tin foil hat is telling me it’s one of the other social media companies funding a hacking group to do it. They stand to have the most to lose, and they’ve seemingly decided to enjoy changing the narrative regarding multiple topics. Lemmy stands directly against what the bigger social medias stand for.

I have no evidence to back this though. As a business owner I just know that things become very consistent when people are being paid, and very inconsistent when they aren’t. These attacks are seemingly very consistent/organized.

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53 points

You think a company that is posed to go public is going to attack a competitor with a minuscule amount of traffic with extremely illegal material that could put them in prison for even having?

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4 points

See, I don’t believe this was done by a large corp. But all the DDoSing that’s happened? I can see u/spez orchestrating that.

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3 points

Reddit? No. I was thinking moreso Meta. They have the deeper pockets and a proven track record of breaking privacy laws to their own benefit.

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-1 points

You would pay a third party to do it. And keep details extremely vague so you have plausible deniability.

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21 points

You have a massively inflated view of Lemmy’s importance in the social media market.

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18 points

There must be room under that tinfoil hat for the both of us, because this was my first thought too.

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15 points

The longer it continues, the more likely that scenario is IMO. Bitter alt-right extremists would probably start losing interest after a short while, whereas social media competitors would stand to gain from long-term interference.

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11 points

Come on in! There’s cookies.

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13 points

I’d go with state actors first.

When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax…), or yet another that will sell out it’s host country’s citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you’d need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don’t like the idea of lemmy, and it’ll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

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5 points

Yep, that’s a great point.

Add to that the fact that mainstream social media companies wouldn’t touch DDoS and CSAM attacks with a 100-foot pole, even if they contracted with a third party. Both of these attacks are highly illegal and would surely ruin a publicly traded company (or one that’s trying to go public, like Reddit).

And don’t forget Russia in your list of state actors who are threatened by the unrestricted flow of information. They definitely don’t want their citizenry to be informed of how disastrously their invasion of Ukraine is going, or what a murderous scumbag Putin is.

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4 points

You don’t get a lot of upvotes and sure we don’t know but it isn’t like the NSA infiltrated (in person) left wing groups and more.

It’s definitely a possibility that someone doesn’t like decentralised content enough to put some meager efforts against it.

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4 points
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This makes the most sense to me. It’s a pretty vitriolic attack, therefore I don’t think it’s simply a troll while at the same time I don’t believe it’s any corporate social media.

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1 point
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0 points

Considering all the alt-right garbage that was popping up there the last couple of days this seems at least plausible. I sometimes envy their ability to utterly destroy anything they touch.

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3 points

I’m sure you’d love to link to some examples

See people claim this constantly with no proof

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2 points
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You want me to link posts that the mods removed? That seems like an unrealistic expectation. You could always check the post pinned to the top of lemmyshitpost where they describe the recent problems, but I suspect you didn’t ask for proof in good faith

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-6 points

I wouldn’t put it past the hexbear crazies throwing a tantrum. They claim to be left wing… Sure seem more like fascist trumper types though. Maybe it’s just that they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.

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43 points

Throwing a tantrum about what exactly? They’re one of the oldest-running Lemmy instances. Until now they were running a fork based on a pre-Federation version of the codebase.

You believe they did a bunch of work migrating their database only to then negate that work by destroying the community they wanted to Federate with?

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14 points

Well something to keep in mind is that hexbear isn’t one person … it’s a whole community that’s developed independently for a while. So it’s reasonable to expect that there’d be variation in the behaviours of members in the same way there’s variation on the rest of lemmy. From what I’ve gathered, not all hexbear members are keen on the re-federation, and some aren’t too keen on being “well-behaved” around politically opposed users (ie “libs”), though hexbear admins and other users have promised moderation and that such isn’t part of the core hexbear values.

It’s social media, afterall … and people can be rather shit and ruin it for the rest of us. In the end, the core service provided a social media platform isn’t the hardware, sys-admin-work or software (however necessary they are) … it’s the moderation work.

The moderation keeps the place sanitary enough for people to actually want to be here … however much we may have problems with particular actions of our moderators, we should really support and praise them at every turn.

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9 points

At least a handful of users on hexbear had made their intention clear during the first week of re-federation, they were looking to cause chaos on Lemmy for there own pleasure. I don’t know if they were banned and/or their comments deleted.

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-2 points

Big difference between a few users who did a bunch of work and the toxic goonsquad the majority of the userbase turned into.

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32 points

they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.

Downvote from me there. I’ve seen plenty of examples of hexbear people being nice, interesting and good sports. They definitely seem to have more of shitposting culture than is normal on mainstream lemmy. But all in all it’s seemed fun to me from what I’ve seen.

Beyond all that, this is just superficial and prejudicial. If you had some examples to link to or more substantial insights to share as to why it’d be “them”, that’d be worth reading.

Otherwise, they’re an instance. Not one person, I’m sure some on hexbear are assholes and some awesome.

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-43 points

So, so shocked someone it’s from lemmygrad that is defending the notoriously toxic “communist” tanky trollfest instance.

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22 points
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117 points
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So, from memory there has been:

  • This recent attack
  • Regular DDOS attacks
  • Frequent attempts to spam community creation
  • That one time the instance got hacked and set to redirect to shock sites

Am I missing anything?

This seems like more than just a few trolls. Maybe someone really doesn’t want to see user-owned social media take off.

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87 points

I see where you’re going with this, but no, people really are just absolutely horrible. The fact is that with other social media they’re just already very set up in managing this so we never see it. Lemmy wants to be open, this is the flipside of that openness.

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21 points

It’s generally easy to crap on what’s ‘bad’ about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.

A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.

While I hope that’s not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.

I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.

To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.

It’s going to take time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.

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16 points
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The solution in this case is absolutely AI filters. Unfortunately you won’t find many people willing to build robust model for that. Because they’d be those getting the ptsd you mention.

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38 points

It is very reminiscent of the trolls in the earlier web.

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70 points

big F in chat for those of you dealing with this. my #1 fear about setting upand instance.

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44 points

It impacts everyone when this shit happens. It takes time for mods/admins to take down. And you can’t unsee it.

I hope nobody else has the misfortune of stumbling on that shit

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42 points

There have been studies which found playing tetris for an hour or two after seeing something traumatic can prevent it taking root in our longterm memory.

I tried it once after accidentally clicking a link on reddit that turned out to be gore, I can’t remember exactly what it was now (about 9 months later) so it must have worked

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30 points

This advice is a few hours too late for me. Hope it helps others

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7 points

That’s pretty genious. One way to work with trauma is moving the eyes from side to side along to a moving light. It’s basically to force the brain to work through something that used to stall it. So tetris, since it is highly reactive and logical, also needs spatial thinking, should very much force the brain to work instead of stalling.

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6 points

Can you please link a study?

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4 points

Yeah you really can’t. I’m pretty desensitized from earlier internet with death and other shock gore content but had managed to avoid CSAM until today. It was a lot worse than I expected, felt my heart drop. Worse, my app autoplays gifs in thumbnail so it kept going while I was reporting it.

I’ve mostly forgotten and it wasn’t on my mind until I saw this thread (happened less than 24hr ago) but even the slightest reminder is oddly upsetting. Wish I’d thought of the Tetris thing.

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68 points

Why do these deranged fucks do this

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20 points

You really think the trolls would pass up on this golden opportunity?

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70 points

This isn’t trolling, this is just disgusting crime.

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-18 points
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The crime happened in the past when the children were abused. This is some weird amalgam of criminal trolling.

Edit: yeah yeah I get that csam is criminal, that’s why I called it an amalgam. It’s both trolling and criminal.

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27 points

Archive.org gets crapped up this way, too. Repulsive people posting repulsive stuff, “troll” is too kind a word.

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16 points
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67 points

I literally am going to give up social media in general if this doesn’t stop

Seen it last night late around 3am shit made me sick I honestly almost cried but I just closed the app and tried not to think about it

Whatever the goal is it’s a stark reminder that there is monsters creeping in the shadows every where you go

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