I'm trying to block the Lemmit.online bot but its profile doesn't load for me : lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

Is it loading for you?

Edit : I managed to block it from one of the community feeds UI, but its still weird that the profile doesn't load through lemm.ee

If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won't go the same way eventually?

I've read that the Fediverse is a bunch of interconnected social media sites. Yet, when I try to log into a new Fediverse site using credentials from another, it doesn't work - I have to make a new account on the new site. For example, I made an account on Lemm.ee and assumed that I could use it to log into hexbear because they are both part of the Fediverse. This was not the case and I will have to make a new account for hexbear. This leads me to wonder though, how are the different Fediverse sites connected? They seem to be completely separate websites.

Hello,

Basically, title.

Would it be possible to get appointed as mod for [email protected] ?

If you want more context: https://lemm.ee/post/12111335

Tldr: we are looking for a new home for the [email protected] community, and would like to host it here, on lemm.ee!

What happened? Is it a bug? The posts are outdated.

Here's two links for comparison:

• lemm.ee view
• programming.dev view

So, I've noticed a few posts making it to "all" from some some communities that are, shall we say, unsympathetic to the Israelis readarding the attacks over the weekend.

I don't want to get into a row about the situation itself as you can have one of them anywhere online right now.

However, some of it slips into being supportive and almost enthusiastic about Hamas actions.

In quite a few countries, Hamas are a legally proscribed terrorist organisation, and support of them is specifically illegal. Therefore I'm wondering if there is any risk hosting federated content from these instances if you happen to live in said country and host a Lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example being based in the EU where they are deemed as terrorists.

I’ve heard rumors of this coming but with this influx of SPAM Reddit bots, I need a solution. I can’t keep up with the number of communities to block them all individually. Without self-hosting, what options do I have?

I think the boom of users is because of Reddit's API changes, I am here because I was permanently banned from Reddit because I had an opinion

see linked post. I believe this would count as one of the examples given in the federation policy https://lemm.ee/post/401063 :

An instance which is knowingly spreading CSAM into the federated network

Not sure if this has been asked before or not. I tried searching and couldn't find anything. I have an issue where any pictures from startrek.website do not show up on the homepage. It seems to only affect startrek.website. Going to the link directly loads the image just fine. Is this something wrong with lemm.ee?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5719058

Follow up on a previous post: [DISCUSS] Recent momentary outages

I've been working on a simple opt-in solution, primarily for Lemmy end users like me (but also helpful for admins), to easily check the status/health of their favourite instance.

🌎 lemmy-meter.info

You can find the details of the implementation in lemmy-meter github repo.

❓ @admins: would you be interested in adding your instance to lemmy-meter?

You don't need to do anything except confirming - I'll handle the rest. It should only take a few minutes for your instance to show up in lemmy-meter.

Out of the box it will send only 4 HTTP GET requests per minute to your instance. However that is totally configurable if it sounds too much or too little.

PS: I wasn't sure how to reach out to the admins short of messaging them individually.

Hello! I'm a member of the FossCAD community and was wondering if it would be okay to host c/Fosscad here on lemm.ee. [email protected] was recently removed as the admin wasnt comfortable hosting printed arms content.

This potential Fosscad community would be about discussing the safe and technologically interesting art of printing of guns and other arms. A practice that is legal in the United States for most citizens.

I just wanted to ask first, since I can definitely understand that its a potentially touchy subject even if completely legal.

Is it possible to style lemm.ee communities with custom CSS styles? If not, is this a feature which should be in place?

@[email protected] I'm crossposting this here just to make sure that you get to see it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4500908

In the past months, there's a been a issue in various instances where accounts would start uploading blatant CSAM to popular communities. First of all this traumatizes anyone who gets to see it before the admins get to it, including the admins who have to review to take it down. Second of all, even if the content is a link to an external site, lemmy sill caches the thumbnail and stores it in the local pict-rs, causing headaches for the admins who have to somehow clear that out. Finally, both image posts and problematic thumbnails are federated to other lemmy instances, and then likewise stored in their pict-rs, causing such content to be stored in their image storage.

This has caused multiple instances to take radical measures, from defederating liberaly, to stopping image uploads to even shutting down.

Today I'm happy to announce that I've spend multiple days developing a tool you can plug into your instance to stop this at the source: pictrs-safety

Using a new feature from pictr-rs 0.4.3 we can now cause pictrs to call an arbitary endpoint to validate the content of an image before uploading it. pictrs-safety builds that endpoint which uses an asynchronous approach to validate such images.

I had already developed fedi-safety which could be used to regularly go through your image storage and delete all potential CSAM. I have now extended fedi-safety to plug into pict-rs safety and scan images sent by pict-rs.

The end effect is that any images uploaded or federated into your instance will be scanned in advance and if fedi-safety thinks they're potential CSAM, they will not be uploaded to your image storage at all!

This covers three important vectors for abuse:

• Malicious users cannot upload CSAM to for trolling communities. Even novel GenerativeAI CSAM.
• Users cannot upload CSAM images and never submit a post or comment (making them invisible to admins). The images will be automatically rejected during upload
• Deferated images and thumbnails of CSAM will be rejected by your pict-rs.

Now, that said, this tool is AI-driven and thus, not perfect. There will be false positives, especially around lewd images and images which contain children or child-topics (even if not lewd). This is the bargain we have to take to prevent the bigger problem above.

By my napkin calculations, false positive rates are below 1%, but certainly someone's innocent meme will eventually be affected. If this happen, I request to just move on as currently we don't have a way to whitelist specific images. Don't try to resize or modify the images to pass the filter. It won't help you.

For lemmy admins:

• pictrs-safety contains a docker-compose sample you can add to your lemmy's docker-compose. You will need to your put the .env in the same folder, or adjust the provided variables. (All kudos to @[email protected] for the docker support).
• You need to adjust your pict-rs ENVIRONMENT as well. Check the readme.
• fedi-safety must run on a system with GPU. The reason for this is that lemmy provides just a 10-seconds grace period for each upload before it times out the upload regardless of the results. A CPU scan will not be fast enough. However my architecture allows the fedi-safety to run on a different place than pictrs-safety. I am currently running it from my desktop. In fact, if you have a lot of images to scan, you can connect multiple scanning workers to pictrs-safety!
• For those who don't have access to a GPU, I am working on a NSFW-scanner which will use the AI-Horde directly instead and won't require using fedi-safety at all. Stay tuned.

For other fediverse software admins

fedi-safety can already be used to scan your image storage for CSAM, so you can also protect yourself and your users, even on mastodon or firefish or whatever.

I will try to provide real-time scanning in the future for each software as well and PRs are welcome.

Divisions by zero

This tool is already active now on divisions by zero. It's usage should be transparent to you, but do let me know if you notice anything wrong.

Support

If you appreciate the priority work that I've put in this tool, please consider supporting this and future development work on liberapay:

https://liberapay.com/db0/

All my work is and will always be FOSS and available for all who need it most.

I'm trying to get an image to show up for the icon and banner for a community, but it seems image uploads are disabled. However I can not figure out how to link an external image for the community banner.

Does anyone have a solution to this? I see other communities with banners and icons.

During the weekend, I received the following message from a now deleted post originally titled ‘Why does such a large portion of Lemm.ee want to block Hexbear? And, how can Hexbearians improve?’:

Can you please share with the class how to find out what instances are defederated from hexbear? Some of us are still figuring out Lemmy. Thank you in advance!

First of all, if any of you are also wondering the same, you can check here with the defed.xyz website. Second of all, that question made me wonder why so many users here keep asking about defederation and I think the answer lies with this telling part of a comment made by @sunaurus about the possible defederation from Hexbear:

We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with having limited manpower, resources etc. However, I personally believe that because of the sudden growth of this community, many (especially new) users are simply not aware of the fact that they will be left mostly to themselves and instead expect such a big instance to be better regulated/moderated. I know I was at first for those reasons.

Case in point, in the same post where I received the question, I was also attacked multiple times. And many other times (both in the weekend and in the past) I’ve been privately contacted to be harassed. What was particularly sad this time was that the mods here, instead of deleting the abusive comments which I reported several times, decided instead to remove the whole post altogether while those comments themselves were never touched. So, not only the reporting option became pointless, but it also removed (in my opinion) a nice conversation on the topic. In the mod log they wrote ‘reason: Troll bait’ for why the post was removed, but I find...let’s say very coincidental that every time a discussion about Hexbear (which might start very calmly at first) has then to be locked or deleted because of the trolling.

Now I would like to directly address a point made by @sunaurus, because while it’s true that we can

downvote and/or report as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities

that method is completely pointless if reports are not being acted upon. Additionally, while it’s true that one user can block specific users, that is also pointless if you are being dogpiled on since for every user you block, you are going to have a new one who you didn’t know and can now attack you. That seems like a very naive approach in my personal opinion. Also, because while the Hexbear admins might be great people trying to properly moderate their own instance and to look out for other users, the individual users might not share their views. And to illustrate this point, after @sunaurus shared his optimism here about Hexbear that

They [Hexbear admins] have implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119

the top comment in the post where the admins explain the new rules is literally

Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.

So I most certainly don’t share @sunaurus optimism that the mods will be able to contain all those users who behave badly, especially if they go on other smaller instances like ours, where they have no power. Thus, users in this instance are really left to fend for themselves.

Before concluding, I would like to quote part of a comment that @sunaurus made in that now-deleted weekend post:

over the past few weeks, I have received several DMs from users directly attacking me for not defederating Hexbear. This instance is provided through volunteer effort, I am not planning to respond to feedback in the form of demands or attacks, so I am not responding to these DMs directly, but I will write a generic response here: 1. Lemmy allows you to block users and communities 2. Lemmy will soon also allow you to block instances 3. You always have the option to switch to another instance with a different approach to federation, or start your own

I want to make absolutely clear that those people who sent him DMs to personally attack him are to be condemned. It is not acceptable to bully others, and we must remember the human behind each account. Also, both him and the admins are doing this whole thing out of pure interest. They are not paid to do so, nor they have to so. So I thank them for that, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who is appreciative of all their efforts in trying to give us all a nice community to be in.

If you, however, have also been attacked by some Hexbear users and/or were frustrated by the (lack of) admins support here, you now have a fuller picture of the situation. You also have an actual tool to help you to decide where to leave to if this is how things are, and you feel like they don’t work for you here. The beauty of so many different instances on Lemmy is that there are many different options to suit your own need. But I also think it’s important to manage expectations and to be clear upfront about what to expect upon joining Lemm.ee (at least at the moment).

I would be curious to know if users who have been in this instance for longer also had similar experiences. If not, I’d still be curious to know your thoughts because it has been made clear that defederating is not an option which is being considered, but some people here keep raising the question. I wrote this to share my thoughts, but also to update new users/give them a way to walk away if they so wished. Trying to forcibly push for a change in this instance’s direction when the admins have made clear they are not interested is pointless. And attacking admins is wrong

I just saw my first Hexbear post, and I am not used to seeing this level of stupid. I don't want to see any more of it.

I started the process of enabling 2 factor for my lemm.ee account but was unable to complete it. Now I’m unable to login and Forgot Password isn’t able to help (still requires 2fa). Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I’ve been unsuccessful in trying to contact Sunaurus.

https://lemm.ee/comment/3432900

I made this comment yesterday, however it doesn't show up in my profile nor on lemm.ee - all I can see is replies to the comment from my notifications, but not the comment tree in the post and all 3 replies have the same url to the same non-existent parent comment. When I browse the full comments none of them show up. It also appears on some federated instances, but not others - it's there on kbin, but not on lemmy.world or dbzer0 - yet somehow I have replies from all 3.

hello im new here i came from reddit to lemm.ee to find a great community and make new friends so i hope this transition from reddit to lemm.ee goes good hehe ^^

Update: so, the responses this far are almost universally that these bots have been blocked by users of the community. There is also a general disinterest in defederating, which is on brand.

You guys wanna do a poll or something or?

I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from the admins regarding bots within lemm.ee:

“Bots must not be responsible for the majority of content in any community”

There are two entire instances that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online. Their content is quite literally 90% bot content with 0 engagement, and they spam constantly.

Now here at lemm.ee we generally don’t defend from stuff, that’s actually why I prefer this instance. Yes, you can block the bot users and that solves the problem, but hear me out:

These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users. They spam so many posts, attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app. If you’re a new user coming to Lemm.ee sorting by all, you see tons and tons of empty posts.

Zerobytes is particularly egregious because it doesn’t even repost actual content, just thousands and thousands of links to Reddit posts. It’s a spam instance, period, and I feel strongly about this.

Lemmit.online isn’t quite as bad, but it’s an entire instance dedicated to spam reposting everything from Reddit. All the posts have zero engagement, and the comment value is gone so everything decent gets buried.

Yes there are ways around this on an individual user level, but then you’re creating a context where there’s even less engagement in the vast majority of “new” posts.

Anyway, thems my thoughts. Repost bots are stupid, one that drive traffic to Reddit are even worse. Thoughts?

Im seeing (in liftoff from world) a "banned" flare on a lot of posts lately. Is it applied to members because of their instance being banned or is that not possable?

Hey folks!

I made a short post last night explaining why image uploads had been disabled. This was in the middle of the night for me, so I did not have time to go into a lot of detail, but I'm writing a more detailed post now to clear up where we are now and where we plan to go.

What's the problem?

As shared by the lemmy.world team, over the past few days, some people have been spamming one of their communities with CSAM images. Lemmy has been attacked in various ways before, but this is clearly on a whole new level of depravity, as it's first and foremost an attack on actual victims of child abuse, in addition to being an attack on the users and admins on Lemmy.

What's the solution?

I am putting together a plan, both for the short term and for the longer term, to combat and prevent such content from ever reaching lemm.ee servers.

For the immediate future, I am taking the following steps:

1) Image uploads are completely disabled for all users

This is a drastic measure, and I am aware that it's the opposite of what many of our users have been hoping, but at the moment, we simply don't have the necessary tools to safely handle uploaded images.

2) All images which have federated in from other instances will be deleted from our servers, without any exception

At this point, we have millions of such images, and I am planning to just indiscriminately purge all of them. Posts from other instances will not be broken after the deletion, the deleted images will simply be loaded directly from other instances.

3) I will apply a small patch to the Lemmy backend running on lemm.ee to prevent images from other instances from being downloaded to our servers

Lemmy has always loaded some images directly from other servers, while saving other images locally to serve directly. I am eliminating the second option for the time being, forcing all images uploaded on external instances to always be loaded from those servers. This will somewhat increase the amount of servers which users will fetch images from when opening lemm.ee, which certainly has downsides, but I believe this is preferable to opening up our servers to potentially illegal content.

For the longer term, I have some further ideas:

4) Invite-based registrations

I believe that one of the best ways to effectively combat spam and malicious users is to implement an invite system on Lemmy. I have wanted to work on such a system ever since I first set up this instance, but real life and other things have been getting in the way, so I haven't had a chance. However, with the current situation, I believe this feature is more important then ever, and I'm very hopeful I will be able to make time to work on it very soon.

My idea would be to grant our users a few invites, which would replenish every month if used. An invite will be required to sign up on lemm.ee after that point. The system will keep track of the invite hierarchy, and in extreme cases (such as spambot sign-ups), inviters may be held responsible for rule breaking users they have invited.

While this will certainly create a barrier of entry to signing up on lemm.ee, we are already one of the biggest instances, and I think at this point, such a barrier will do more good than harm.

5) Account requirements for specific activities

This is something that many admins and mods have been discussing for a while now, and I believe it would be an important feature for lemm.ee as well. Essentially, I would like to limit certain activities to users which meet specific requirements (maybe account age, amount of comments, etc). These activities might include things like image uploads, community creation, perhaps even private messages.

This could in theory limit creation of new accounts just to break rules (or laws).

6) Automated ML based NSFW scanning for all uploaded images

I think it makes sense to apply automatic scanning on all images before we save them on our servers, and if it's flagged as NSFW, then we don't accept the upload. While machine learning is not 100% accurate and will produce false positives, I believe this is a trade-off that we simply need to accept at this point. Not only will this help against any potential CSAM, it will also help us better enforce our "no pornography" rule.

This would potentially also allow us to resume caching images from other instances, which will improve both performance and privacy on lemm.ee.

With all of the above in place, I believe we will be able to re-enable image uploads with a much higher degree of safety. Of course, most of these ideas come with some significant downsides, but please keep in mind that users posting CSAM present an existential threat to Lemmy (in addition to just being absolutely morally disgusting and actively harmful to the victims of the abuse). If the choice is between having a Lemmy instance with some restrictions, or not having a Lemmy instance at all, then I think the restrictions are the better option.

I also would appreciate your patience in this matter, as all of the long term plans require additional development, and while this is currently a high priority issue for all Lemmy admins, we are all still volunteers and do not have the freedom to dedicate huge amounts of hours to working on new features.

As always, your feedback and thoughts are appreciated, so please feel free to leave a comment if you disagree with any of the plans or if you have any suggestions on how to improve them.

I find this to be a more convenient way to upload images to Imgur. You need:

• Upload image to Imgur Shortcut
• Imgur iOS App

By using the app you can still edit/delete the image. Videos aren’t supported by the shortcut. It’s a super simple shortcut, but using it means you can upload the image/s via share sheet and automatically get the url in your clipboard.