Dear Lemmy.world Community,
Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I’m reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I’m sure you can probably guess what we’ve had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I’ll add the thing we’re talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don’t know.
Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.
The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn’t apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.
This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it’s relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.
We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.
Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Lemmy.world Administration
spoiler
CSAM
There are lots of ideas from people, but unfortunately Lemmy software doesn’t actually support most of them. And in terms of adding support to Lemmy, well there are just two devs plus community support so if people have the skills they may want to consider contributing code to implement some of these things.
Edit: just adding that some instances are building bots (kinda like an automod) but with 1,000+ instances we kinda need something built in
I think that’s at least partially why that Sublinks fork is starting. It’s in Java so the number of people capable of helping is much, much larger.
And while I’m excited to see how that turns out, I’ve got some reservations, particularly about some of the “moderation tools” being suggested, but if it breathes new life and excitement into a fediverse Reddit replacement, that’s a good thing.
The cool thing about ActivityPub is that we don’t have to pick one. Some instances run Kbin, some Mbin, some Lemmy. Some can run Sublinks and everyone gets to interact with each other.
The way federation works, instances can’t force their stuff on other instances. If a post on a community on your instance is removed by an admin of a different instance, then you’ll still see it on yours and they won’t see it on theirs (the exception is if the post is in a community where a moderator of that community or admin of that instance removes it, then it removes it for everyone - though Lemmy still has some quirks in regards to that), so different instances can have different moderation policies and you join one that matches the moderation policy you want.
If people want to help they can contribute to lemmy directly, or write moderation tools in other languages. It won’t help anyone to spend 8+ man years of development only to reach feature parity.
Ah yes, the open source way