Hello Reddthat,
It has been a while since I posted a general update, so here we go!
Slight content warning regarding this post. If you don’t want to read depressing things, skip to # On a lighter note.
The week of issues
If you are not aware, the last week(s) or so has been a tough one for me & all other Lemmy admins. With recent attacks of users posting CSAM, a lot of us admins have been feeling a wealth of pressure.
Starting to be familiar with the local laws surrounding our instances as well as being completely underwhelmed with the Lemmy admin tools. All of these issues are a first for Lemmy and the tools do not exist in a way that enable us to respond fast enough or in a way in which content moderation can be effective.
If it happens on another instance it still affects everyone, as it effects every fediverse instance that you federate against.
As this made “Lemmy” news it resulted in Reddthat users asking valid questions on our !community@reddthat.com. I responded with the plan I have if we end up getting targeted for CSAM. At this point in time a user chose violence upon waking up and started to antagonise me for having a plan. This user is a known Lemmy Administrator of another instance. They instigated a GDPR request for their information. While I have no issue with their GDPR instigation, I have an issue with them being antagonising, abusive, and
Alternatively, stop attracting attention you fuckhead; a spineless admin saying “I’m Batman” is exactly how you get people to mess with you
Unfortunately they chose to create multiple accounts to abuse us further. This is not conduct that is conducive for conversation nor is it conduct fitting of a Lemmy admin either. As a result we have now de-federated from the instance under the control of that admin.
To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.
This will hopefully help them understand what is and isn’t acceptable conduct while they are on Reddthat.
On a lighter note
Stability
Server stability has been fixed by our hosting provider and a benefit is that we’ve been migrated to newer infrastructure. What this does for our vCPU is yet to be determined but we have benefited and have confirmed our status monitoring service (over here) is working perfectly and is detecting and alerting me.
Funding
Donations on a monthly basis are now completely covering our monthly costs! I can’t thank you enough for these as it really does help keep the lights on.
In August we had 4 new donators, all recurring as well! Thank you so much!
Merch / Site Redesign
I would like to offer merchandise for those who want a hoody, mouse pad, stickers, etc.
Unfortunately I am a backend person, not a graphics designer. Thus if anyone would like to make some designs please let me know in the comments below. 🧡 An example:
I am thinking we need at least 3+ design choices:
- The Logo itself (Sticker/Phone/Magnet)
- Logo with Reddthat text
- Logo with
Where You've Truly 'ReddThat'! - Something cool that you would want on a hoody. <- Very important!
I’ve managed to find some on-demand printing services which will allow you to purchase directly through them and have it shipped directly from a local-ish printing facilities.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes you to get your merch, reduce the costs of shipping and hopefully ensure I know as little as possible about you as I can. If all goes to plan, I won’t know about your addresses / payments / etc and everyone can have some cool merch!
New Admins
To help combat the spamming issue, the increase of reports and the new approval system I am looking for some new administrators to join the team.
While I do not expect you to do everything I do, an hour or two a day in your respective timezone, which amounts to randomly opening reddthat a couple times a day. Checking in to confirm everything is still hunky-dory is probably the minimum.
If you would like to apply to being an Admin to help us all out, please PM me with your approval answering the following questions:
Reason for your application:
Timezone:
Time you could allocate a day (estimate):
What you think you could bring to the team:
I am thinking we’ll need about 6 admins to have full coverage around the globe and ensure that everyone will not be burnt out after a week! So even if you see a new admin pop up in the sidebar don’t worry, there is always room for more!
Parting words
Thank you for those who have reached out and gave help. Thank you to the other Lemmy admins who helped me, and thank you everyone on Reddthat for still being here and enjoying our time together.
Cheers,
Tiff
tldr
- We have now defederated from our first instance :(
- Signups now are via Application process
- We had 4 new people join our recurring donations last month! 💛
- Merch is in the works. If you have some design skills please submit your designs in the comments!
- Admin recruitment drive
Hi Tiff,
Thanks for the update, I am so sorry to hear that you have to deal with all that shit. I stand with you, no tolerance for CSAM.
I have seen more than a few posts/comments mention the lack of moderation tooling for Lemmy so I had a look. It seems Lemmy (and the fediverse) is severely lacking right now.
The mastodon docs recommend blocking IPs and email servers, for such a mature project I would expect better options. There are a couple issues of LemmyNet GitHub, but they are old (may 2022), and I was disheartened to see the level of moderation tooling right now. No hate towards the devs, they have been swamped the past few months, I hope they don’t burnout having to face one crisis after the other…
I saw Mozilla is starting an effort to create better moderation tooling for mastodon, I wonder if they could help out… Some of them are probably listening right now.
Also, if it would help I could spin up a database + API, for instances to share their banned users, IPs, hashes of media files, and links. If someone could use it to create a bot to automatically delete users/posts/comments, it could help consolidate admin and mod efforts across the lemmyverse.
Yeah, even mastodon suffers from undersirable tooling. Even when it could be classed as a mature project.
Thankyou for the offer but the activity pub spec does allow for some information sharing. For example, users have a flag if they are banned on their home server that is shared. So that if the home server bans them, it also propagates.
But a… feature of Lemmy is that if a post on a community gets deleted it only happens on that local community.
So if a post is deleted on the home community it isn’t deleted on any other instance that has subscribers. This is by design and works great when used for non-nefarious means. As a bad post on a community filters out for all other admins/mods to deal with.
We will get there :)