Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.
Part of the problem is the instance’s open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.
We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.
Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world
Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we’re setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!
Thanks for the transparency, sad to hear as always to see a country specific instance to go unmanaged
Edit: I guess a few people will miss [email protected] from @[email protected]
New home: [email protected]
Will probably post to both for a while, until we have some kind of resolution.
Just subscribed, good to see you there.
I might migrate [email protected] there too in the coming weeks
You can still go to the instance and read it, subscribe to it from a non-defederated instance, or even create an account there directly.
Let’s also hope it’s only temporary.
Sucks to see my home countries instance isn’t being moderated properly
Well .world is also managed partly from NL :-)
Don’t tell our plans…
Can’t wait for GEKOLONISEERD
GEKOLONISEERD.world
Please use “I N G E P O L D E R D” as its not quite as racist as “GEKOLONISEERD”.
For the people not in the know, the Dutch like to meme about the warcrimes in Indonesia and Africa and when they speak dutch in a comment section they make joking gestures to the time of colonization, like its a good thing, or something to take lightly. Quite frankly colonizing isnt funny in any shape or form and I, another dutch person feel ashamed and sorry for whoever took offense to the comment above. Not of all of us are like this.
Our history books mostly skip over the warcrimes done in indonesia and how bad the slave trade is, but its luckily improving.
For the guy above me;
Warcrimes of the Dutch in Indonesia:
https://youtu.be/8T3JZljI7A4?si=XvLOhL-m2VHkxByN
How the dutch turned south africa into a racist country:
https://youtu.be/Mi93LjuQbMM?si=1La19-xJ-JsBXLpZ
Over half a million people got ripped away from their families and traded by the Dutch in the 1800s;
https://www.statista.com/chart/22057/countries-most-active-trans-atlantic-slave-trade/
This is why I think it shouldnt be taken lightly. Its like a german joking about the time their ancestors murdered millions of jews and bringing it up whenever they see another German in a comment thread.
They’ve already replied with the reasons, but - for future reference - if you want to see specifics of things like this, a censure is often posted to https://fediseer.com. .world’s censure of .nl is here
Updated the original post. FYI You can click on the fediseer endorsement emblem that is in the Lemmy World sidebar. That will take you here: https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world
You guys are very transparent and that’s great. Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
Hiya! Question, is there a way we can see this sort of information ourselves as well? Namely, reports and admin activity logs.
What’s to stop an instance, then a collection of instances and so on from claiming others aren’t being actively moderated in order to censor?
Not making any accusations obviously, just a thought I had while reading.
I mean, it’s easy to go over to feddit.nl and see they only have one admin who has not been active in almost two weeks.
Full transparancy: the abuse we were dealing with from that instance was vote manipulation and worse, csam. Especially in the case of csam we can not wait for days for a reaction.
Users. That’s why it is mentioned there is no email required during sign-up. They create an account in seconds, make a post and then delete their account.
You guys are doing good work!
Thanks for doing this. I’ve not had to see any of it because you guys are on top of dealing with it. (Although I also don’t sort posts by new, so I probably wouldn’t see those posts before they got removed anyway.)
Were they the source of the csam attack posts the other week when we removed picture uploads temporarily?
No those were from our own instance and is the reason we closed open registrations. We are working on a different solution more on that later.
The modlog for the entire instance is available in a link at the bottom and the sidebar on the main page. Everything should be there.
Thank you!
With the nature of the recent attacks I think it makes perfect sense to take strong precautions necessary to protect the community. Can always refederate when/if the admin gets ahold of the situation.
For sure. We reached out before too but we can not sit around and wait when it’s about this stuff.
What defines an “abusive member”?
CSAM post
Thank you for defederating with them; I can’t unsee the horrible auto play video that showed up on my feed. Some people are really sick
I haven’t seen anything and not sure what CSAM is. What was it?
CSAM stands for child sex abuse material. I’m going to leave it at that.
Eck… Okay thanks
You certainly buried the lead, Jesus Christ. Thanks for staying on top of all this and being transparent.
Fun fact, it’s buried the lede not lead. Weird right! The more you know :-D
Lede vs lead is always a weird dichotomy to me, because the whole purpose of lede is that it isn’t supposed to be a word, right? I did some journalism in high school and I believe we were taught that lede was purposely not a word so that you could write “lede goes here” as a placeholder, and you’d be reminded of it because spell check would flag it.
So I’m never sure which to use, because it feels like using it in common discussion defeats the purpose haha. Either way though, you are right yeah.
They mean the same thing, more or less. Lede is just journalist slang for the story’s introduction, or lead.
"Origin of lede
First recorded in 1950–55; altered spelling of lead (in the journalism sense “short introductory summary”), used in the printing trades to distinguish it from the homograph lead (in the sense “thin strip of type metal for increasing the space between lines of type”)"
It seems like the user who posted the csam has been banned, does that mean the admin/mod is active again?
Oh no, not my beloved neighbors :(
I appreciate the transparency, but isn’t posting that fediseer link just the same as posting collection of CSAM instances, and thus unwanted in any possible way?
You can also go to the “instances” page of every lemmy instance and get the same information. There is no way to block instances secretly.
deleted by creator
Part of the problem is the instance’s open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup.
How is this even a thing? Why would the Lemmy software even allow operation like this?
Lemmy is open source. Everyone can modify it to fit their needs.
Let’s be real - an email address doesn’t really stop much of anything. Anyone can really easily spin up new email addresses freely.
Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there’s plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.
Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn’t matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.
Personally I don’t think anything will stop anyone determined to bring this type of harm to the community, there’s an endless list of workarounds. These communities need a larger network of moderators across timezones
Nope, but it will stop the less determined ones.
With no email verification, you can pretty much create dozens of fake accounts per second - as fast as the API can handle.
Sure. But we changed our sign-up policy recently. Users are now informed during sign-up that temporary email accounts are banned.
We have another announcement regarding this soon.
How do you define a “temporary email account”?
I’m reminded of old games that insisted you couldn’t sign up with an email provider and had to use an ISP email … which kinda screwed over the literally BILLIONS of people whose ISPs don’t give email addresses…
Yeah I still don’t have an email associated with my reddit account. Which shocks people… although I haven’t logged on in months, so maybe it’s now required for legacy accounts
it’s not required globally but some subs require it to be able to post
So far only /r/formula1 does for me
Last I checked, even Reddit allows signups without an email address…
Because anyone running it can decide to do it this way. That’s how code works; you can edit it. Even if the option wasn’t there, if any instance admin wants that to happen it’s easy to do.
Cuz we’re on an anonymous forum basically?
Stuff like this is going to kill the momentum of the fediverse. I’m a reddit refugee, my main account started on vlemmy.net (because it had a policy to not defederate from anything), and when that went poof, I moved to feddit.nl (because it has a policy to not defederate from anything). I believe it is MY prerogative, and no one else’s, to decide what I am or am not allowed to see. I curate my own feed by blocking or subscribing to instances I don’t or do want to see, respectively.
Regardless of any of this, however, I am now unable to view any content on .world without this account, due to actions entirely outside of my control. Since hosting my own instance is out of the question for me, my options are: find a third instance with a no-defederation policy that hasn’t been defederated itself from major instances, have multiple accounts and browse each instance individually, stop browsing altogether, or go back to reddit. As distasteful as the last option is, it’s tempting. I know the impulse will be to tell me “good riddance”, but I am posting this because I know there are others like me that are tired of instance hopping and trying to find somewhere that doesn’t try to police our browsing and also isn’t defederated from major instances.
For the record, I don’t want a no-defederation instance because I want to browse Nazi or pedo instances. I want a no-defederation instance because I have a principled objection to others telling me what I can or cannot view.
I actually prefer that instances can do this, the whole point is to find one you more closely align with like old school forums. The ones they’ve done this to are either mass brigading, full of Nazis or sharing CSAM. They have every right to protect their users from that kind of stuff or make those decisions when they’re individuals paying to run an instance.
Until there’s a tool I can use to fully block instances myself (which I don’t see available) this is the way it’s run. Maybe the fediverse just isn’t for you? As someone who grew up using old school forums this is completely fine and expected. If I am running a website (or store) I have every right to manage it the way I see fit.
If defederation worked more like a shadowban, I would agree with you. .world defederating with feddit.nl could result in no one from .world seeing any content posted by anyone from .nl, but .nl can still see the content from .world. It’s unfortunate that .nl couldn’t participate anymore, but it’s better than that community ceasing to exist.
Defederations as they exist now are like being in a restaurant. There are two employees, one makes the food, the other makes the drinks. It starts out with being able to order either, or both, right from the comfort of your table. However, the owner of the restaurant decides that he just doesn’t care much for drinks, and kicks out the drink-maker. The drink-maker opens a new store across the street, but he does not serve food, only drinks, and the restaurant you started at doesn’t serve drinks, only food. Yes, technically, you are still free to go across the street to get some drinks, or stay here for some food, but boy, wouldn’t it be nicer if that owner never decided he didn’t like drinks? Sure, not EVERYONE in the restaurant cares, but a pretty significant amount of them probably would. They might just go down the street to McReddits. Sure, the food there is pretty bad, but at least they can get both food and drinks without having to go across the street.
I believe it is MY prerogative, and no one else’s, to decide what I am or am not allowed to see. I curate my own feed by blocking or subscribing to instances I don’t or do want to see, respectively.
What about abusive users that post in communities outside of their home instance? I think that’s what we’re talking about here. I can block instances, but there are communities in Lemmy.world that I enjoy and I appreciate the admins effort to keep abusive users out.
Each user can block other users. Moderators can block users. It can be handled the same way that other sites (yes, like reddit) do it. I’m also not opposed to defederation when it is essentially a single-user ban- for example, if there is an instance with no communities, no signup requirement, and has nothing but malicious bots- that’s banning a bot farm, not “defederation” as it’s commonly understood. But with something like this- where feddit.nl is actually a rather large instance- so many people are essentially being punished for absolutely no fault of their own.
Do you understand that when CSAM images are uploaded to an instance, they are federated to other instances as well?
Even if users have the option to block whole instances themselves, there are STILL going to be instances Lemmy World will not be federating with because we don’t want to risk having any of that on our server.
And feddit.nl had a user that posted csam on our instance, which then federates to other instances. So basically everyone gets a copy.
I do understand. I’m expressing a worry that things like this will lead to trouble for the fediverse’s user retention. Nowhere did I say that I didn’t understand the reasoning. It’s not a requirement to have a solution at hand when pointing out a problem. An instance as large as lemmy.world defederating from an instance as large as feddit.nl is a problem. Is the solution giving moderators better tools? Stopping the automatic proliferation of images? Removing the image hosting entirely to rely on external hosts? Or is this an insurmountable problem with no solution? The specific answer, or even existence of an answer, does not determine whether the problem itself exists.
There would not be a problem if the instance was managed. Everyone can start an instance but it takes a lot more to keep it running and moderated. Check the problems beehaw.org are currently going through.
And as you point out, feddit.nl is quite a bit instance but it only has ONE admin. That is a problem. And that is also something to remember when you decide on which instance you want to host your community.
@PrinceHabib72 @antik are you concern trolling? Because this sounds like concern trolling. You know what they say, you let one Nazi in your bar, soon enough you’ll own the Nazi bar.
I’m legitimately unfamiliar with the term. I’m being very genuine. I’m not sure what you mean about the Nazi bar, either. I’m encouraging users to curate their own experiences. Any time they see a Nazi, they can figuratively erase that Nazi from their personal existence. If they see a Nazi bar, they can erase that too. I object to being TOLD, rather than deciding for myself, what bars are Nazi bars.
A user on there posted CSAM. Given that images federate too and that moderation over there seems to be lacking, do you not think it’s unrealistic not to expect defederation?
I never said I didn’t understand. I’m pointing out a problem that can, and I believe, will, lead to issues with user retention. If one is punished for the bad actions of someone on their instance that they have no control over, it will lead to frustration. I know this because it has happened to me twice now- once with vlemmy disappearing due to someone posting something bad that spooked the admin, and now feddit.nl because someone posted something bad that spooked these admins. I’m not saying it’s not understandable, I’m merely saying that a problem exists.
I expect the Admin’s priority was to worry about potentially inadvertently hosting CSAM rather than user retention.
Two problems can exist simultaneously. I’m suggesting that something should be done about defederation, and the things that lead to it (like automatic image proliferation), because if defederation continues as it is, it will hurt user retention.
There is a common thread in your complaints. This isn’t a problem that’s going to kill the fediverse it’s a problem with instances without moderation. Turns out shitty instances that don’t care about moderation are the same ones that “have a policy to not defederate from anything”. Stop joining shitty instances that allow literally illegal content and you won’t have that problem.
having a ‘principled objection’ to others telling you that you can’t see child sexual abuse tapes is very admirable and sounds much better
i doubt its going to change anything though, since ‘principled objection’ to laws doesnt actually stop said laws from applying to you, or the site youre using
Ah yes, the two things- acceptable things and CASM. EVERYTHING IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS.
I feel like the fact that you still consider Reddit an option invalidates your entire point.
