gavi

Hey yall! Just wanted pop on here to announce some things to keep yall in the loop.

We're here, we're alive. A lot of the team has just been pretty busy IRL so it's been more a focus on making things run smoothly rather than figuring out how to proactively improve things. Thankfully I personally am a lot less busy IRL (for now) and will be using it as an opportunity to put together staff apps and look thru inactive communities a bit more, as well as trimming down the sidebar and fixing up the docs pages.

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NSFW Posts show up without needing to login now!

For those who may not have already noticed, but our lovely backend team (major thanks to @yay!) have made it a bit easier to navigate communities and posts without needing to login. Others on other instances should be able to browse local communities here now as well as to be able to access new communities better. We are working on improving the front end and although NSFW posts are blurred by default we are going to make an age gate that you need to click on.

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We will be implementing alternative front end UIs

No ETA on when, but that's something people have expressed interest. The mod tools on some alternative front ends are miles ahead of lemmy's current one.

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Staff apps are coming!

I am working on staff apps, but I am very averse to google forms. If there is any more privacy focused alternative (self hosted is fine if need be!) then please let me know in the comments below. I am personally more and more averse to google as I use the fediverse more.

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Addressing recent spam & defederation

So, lemmy is kind of busted when it comes to cross platform posting especially from mastodon (ok, kind of is an understatement lol) but I defederated from some of the biggest sources of spam thus far.

I also have utilized a "fediblock" block list cataloguing some of the "worst of the worst" instances known within the fediverse. I tried being as selective as possible by vetting instances listed first, finding receipts, as well as using my own knowledge of some of the worst fediverse instances as well. I didn't want to copy and paste a blocklist without vetting what was going in first out of risk that something might slip thru.

We have defederated from a lot of fediverse instances (pretty much all of them arent lemmy, but it's not worth risking it with these awful places we defederated from) and man, there are some abhorrent places in the fediverse. Having things being able to be easily selfhosted is a double edged sword sometimes. Unfortunately lemmy is not like other fediverse platforms that allow hiding domains, so if you decide to peek at the /instances page to view what has been blocked do not interact or visit the instances we have defederated from as more than quite a few are known to host genuine illegal content. You have been warned.

I will be scouring more and seeing which other of the "worst of the worst" places since it feels important to be proactive about other communities that may pose a risk for some members here as our instance grows. Please know I am defederating only the instances that either present a genuine legal problem to our community if their content is federated in or could pose a potential safety risk for vulnerable community members (especially towards trans folks.. there's so many anti-lgbt instances its really quite upsetting.) Know I am doing my due diligence, finding receipts and in some very very select cases (unfortunately) visiting the sites myself to vet them myself.

With that being said, I think it's worth stating given the fact there are just so many anti-LGBT instances in the fediverse (many of which we have blocked thus far) and as more people have shuffled in recently please know that this instance aims to be a safe place for LGBT folks, and has a very strict policy against transphobia. I myself am a gay man, and take support with my trans and nonbinary siblings extremely seriously. The team is pretty much unanimous in our support for LGBT folk, and that's not something we're ever going to budge on. If there's anything that seems hateful please report it directly to an admin and we will take care of it as soon as possible.

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New features are coming to lemmy (soon!)

There's quite a few new good stuff in the works for lemmy, and for those who are seeing from other instances you will be able to block domains on lemmy (hopefully soon!)

Of course that doesn't fix all the issues present, but it's a big step in a positive direction.

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Anyway, it is 2am here. I'm heading to bed. I will be responding tomorrow morning and throughout the day. Feel free to comment below questions, comments, concerns, what have you. I'll try to respond as I time allows.

We are working on figuring out a solution or at some sort of heads up. No, we aren't all celebrity posts.

It's quite sad to watch unfold, but the admin of rammy has been basically MIA all month and exploding-heads users and admin (which we have been de-federated from for a while) has taken notice and has decided to invade and set up shop there to just generally push their stuff into the federation. Entire front page is a hate fest against LGBT people and just general foul bigotry. Hopefully the rammy admin comes back and cleans stuff up, and then we can hopefully re-federate (if they want to.)

Just wanted to give a heads up in case anyone was curious why another instance was added to the blocked server list :/

Hey yall, just wanted to chime in with a quick update on why we were down and have gone down a few times these past few days.

So... for those who don't know a bit on the backend way of how lemmy works right now, it's a lil more than a mess. Lemmy itself uses very little computing resources, you could probably run a decent instance on a toaster (I wouldn't suggest it though) but the problem that arises rapidly is the way photos are managed. The photo database downloads images both that are uploaded and federated. There is an option to disable caching for federated NSFW posts by unchecking enable NSFW within the instance admin panel. That's the only option related disabling federated images as of right now.

You see where I'm going with this, with this instance being as large as it is? Our photo database has been filling up pretty rapidly. We are attempting to troubleshoot solutions to prevent caching all federated content. Unfortunately as our backend team is attempting to figure that out, our pictures database just keeps ballooning more and more.

We have deleted some stuff in hopes to give more time, but we unfortunately have no choice but to migrate to object storage ASAP. Tomorrow there will likely be downtime as we migrate things over, and unfortunately there is no telling how long that will take.

Thank you for being patient and understanding while we navigate this. If you want to see updates to our status when we go down, check out our mastodon page here or come to our matrix public operations channel for updates (link in the sidebar.)

Things should work today though. Emphasis on should.

We are working on open collective still, but hosting this instance does cost money. If you are able to, donations are greatly appreciated. Especially as we will have to factor in object storage into our costs now.

Hey yall and happy Friday! (Or Saturday... depending on where you are).

I was just wanting to pop on here with a condensed list of some announcements of things we are working out, goings on within the community and the lemmyverse, and just generally have a place for any questions, bug reports, or chat within the instance. Unsure what the frequency of these announcements will be, but if I need to make more I will.

How often do you want to see these kinds of threads? Also, I will be responding to this thread all weekend.

Anyway, below is a list of announcements and shiz. Lets get into it!

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Addressing Bots

Unfortunately, we had really not much of a choice but to enable application only registration currently. There was a large influx of spam bots, which does suck but we are approving them as fast as we can. It's likely this will stay, but we will reassess this as Lemmy improves. Currently the question is "why do you want to join this instance" which is a little vague, but unsure what else to change it. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

With that being said, our backend team is working on adding a NSFW yes/no dialogue and allowing NSFW without having to sign up or login. No ETA on when that will happen, but it's a heavy consideration and was discussed prior to this decision.

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Federation Woes

It goes without saying, Lemmy is a little more than barebones right now. Your patience really is appreciated. Our backend team is figuring shit out now to really dive into how to address our needs as an instance and troubleshoot with other instances stuff regarding federation and the current limitations of Lemmy right now. I and some other admins are actively in contact with some other large instances. Coordinating actively with other instance admins has helped quite a bit in making things run generally smoothly.

Right now, we really need to make sure that we are tagging NSFW. People have mostly been good about it, but if you see anything untagged as NSFW please report it. There is question how well edited NSFW tags are being federated, so if you accidentally post something without an NSFW tag consider removing it and reposting it with a NSFW tag instead just out of courtesy for potential federation concerns.

We suspect some apps aren't blurring NSFW posts properly either for those on other instances.

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Image Uploading

It should be noted that it is preferable that those posting images into our community are doing so with a lemmynsfw account. It makes managing content easier and has the potential to save headache with other instances. There are quite a few instances who do federate with us but do not feel comfortable hosting NSFW images on their servers, and I ask you to please be mindful of that. That's not to say you have to be on lemmynsfw to participate here though! You can comment, upvote, etc etc. Just consider if you are posting images either using off site hosting or posting from our instance.

This is not a steadfast rule currently, but that may change in the future and concerns as to when we are actively considering that will be made clear in advance.

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Open Collective

Right now, we are still finding a potential fiscal host for open collective. We’ll update you all once we have more to share.

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Content Creators & Trolling

Per this thread we have established our respect of content creators on our instance. Do not report content creators/onlyfans models as spam unless they are in a community that explicitly prohibits it or are truly posting spam. Also, don't harass content creators. Seriously, be nice.

It goes without saying here though, if you see a comment or post harassing anyone please report it. If a moderator of a community is failing to address it, contact an admin directly. Right now, there is no way to directly report to site staff specifically, it goes into the mod queue and site staff see the entire mod queue.

With that being said, if you are a moderator and are seeing harassing posts as well or feel they are breaking site wide rules, you can delete the reported post and simply not file it as resolved so admins can see it. It is preferable you do this and then/or message an admin.

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Community Stuff & (Potentially) Proposed Changes

As of right now, there is quite a lot of communities that exist within a few varying categories with some overlapping. Some are empty inactive communities, communities without active mods that have any report sent to admins directly, and communities with mods that are active but are still having a large volume of reports, and generally redundant empty communities.

We are discussing the potential of making communities by site staff approval preferably so that if a comm already exists people can be directed to it. We are curious about this as a potential, any thoughts?

We will be purging empty comms, as well as allowing some to be "adopted", and discuss with mods of communities that are having a large report queue or just simply a large number of subscribers that they should get more mods on their team.

If you are a community moderator, please ask to join our matrix mod coord chat.

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New Staff, maybe?

We are still figuring out the potential of adding more members to our team. We do need more content admins, potentially in varying time zones. We are cautious due to the limits of Lemmy of adding new admins though. There are some people in consideration, so if you've discussed such with myself don't worry you'll be contacted in time about it even if you miss staff applications if there are any. If we do proceed with staff applications, an announcement will be made.

Also, having potentially someone who is bit more familiar with rust might be helpful for our backend team as well.

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Updated Rules Are Live

We updated our rules a few days or so ago after posting them and taking into account feedback. The sidebar serves as a condensed version of the rules, whereas docs.lemmynsfw.com will serve as a means of elaborating for those who want to know more in-depth details behind the "why and how" or are community moderators/site staff and want to know more about the basis of what our rule enforcement expectations actually are for the instance.

Our docs page is under construction, so what you see beyond the FAQ is still being built. We will update when new pages are live though. As a reminder, these pages aren't rule changes but rather serve as an in-depth look beyond the condensed rules on the sidebar.

The docs site is still under construction, so expect it to change and more pages to be added and it to improve progressively.

Thank you for your patience yall. It seems our mitigation efforts worked and we were likely never in danger. If you are concerned about other accounts on affected instances, it is unlikely your personal data was breached. Keep a look out for more info on those instances though as they will likely explain things more.

We have little information currently, but we may at least lock the site down for preemptive safety reasons. There seems to be a serious XSS vulnerability within lemmys code. We have disabled community creation temporarily and are contemplating taking the site down temporarily as well. Please find us below and stay safe, ya'll.

https://mastodon.world/@lemmynsfw https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org

EDIT: For the time being we have disabled federation, new user sign ups, and community creation.

We quietly defederated temporarily earlier because lemmy.world seemed to be compromised earlier in some way, but then it was fixed. Now it's happened again. Unsure what is going on over there but there isn't much use speculating. They have been dealing with weird redirects to shock sites like lemonparty (throwback). Whoever has compromised them seems to have some early 2010s internet sense of humor I guess.

Anyway, once they have things under control and an announcement is made we will refederate ASAP. For the time being, please avoid going to their homepage for the time being as we have no idea what the nature of the compromise of their site is and to what extent.

EDIT: seems lemmy.blahaj.zone just was as well. :(

When this instance first started, I don't think it was fully anticipated how large it would get. The place where this instance was when I first stepped up as admin was wholly unsustainable long term. There was little direction as to what the instance's intentions as a website were, and the specific intentions it seemed to lean towards (being a sort of reddit 2.0) is not something we have the ability to handle. Neither monetarily nor legally.

The expectations that this instance specifically would be replacing reddit nsfw content entirely is not realistic, and the expectations that have been had for what all of lemmy is capable of has been much higher than what the backend side of things is at right now. Rome was not built in a day, and the same is true for communities of this nature. We are utilizing a platform based on a philosophy that hasn't been widely used outside of email since the early Internet, while now having to work the laws and limitations that the current Internet now presents as well. It's an experiment, and just like all other communities we have made mistakes and are trying our best while figuring this out together. This is not a business, we are not shareholders, we are simply passionate volunteers.

Right now, our team has been paying attention to concerns and feedback that have been raised. We are currently actively engaged in a discussion of what the next steps are from here. My hasty implementation of the current restrictive content policy was not something to do long term but an attempt to reign in a community with what felt to have little restrictions and many issues popping up. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of managing a community like this. The current policy as it stands right now, has been a band aid while we discuss further how to move forward. And we have been.

And thankfully we have a much bigger back-end team than before. What has helped the most to provide insight is that we have a back-end team member who has active experience in hosting adult websites within the legal span of the law. We also have backend team members who are helping to build mod tools not just for lemmyNSFW but with active collaboration with others across instances as well.

As we have discussed rule changes and throwing things at the wall, our biggest aspect has been determining if we are on the same page as a team. Unfortunately, a now previous back-end team member decided that he was not. And that's ok. However last night, instead of moving forward and deciding that our ethos as a team moving forward isn't for them there was a post that was made that compiled our original rough draft for new content guidelines and attempted to pass them off as that is going to be our full go to as a community. It isn't. We are discussing things and hashing things out as a team still but have made significant progress moving beyond what was discussed. When changes occur, we will make a post clarifying such changes. We ask for patience, please.

Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.

I know there's been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it's been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.

Here's a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.

For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.

Also, there's another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.

The downtime was brief like we hoped, everything seems to be working fine.

@yay@lemmynsfw.com just informed me of such, please be aware. If all goes it'll be around 5 minutes or so. We have a mastodon account as well to provide updates, so be sure to check here or visit our matrix room if things seem to be taking a bit longer than that.