We doubled the amount of mods, and banned anything remotely resembling the things on-site. Sadly many times it had to be a brave lemmygrad to check it first and take the bullet for us to report it. I was one of those people on several occasions. I still cringe at the memories. It lasted a few months iirc.I haven’t seen whatever is hitting you guys, but our bots had some recognizable features, usually hiding their spam behind spoilers or links.

It really was just a mobilization, lockdown, and purging everything that was suspicious until it stopped. That or they found a way to block those bots. I wasn’t in the command center by any means so the internal decisions I don’t know too much about.

Its a bug in sombodies markdown parsing.

Your URL was HTML escaped.

Correct

…?width=640&height=480

Incorrect

…?width=640&height=480

The issue is that you really can’t. The laws are written specifically to prevent plausible deniability. Because pedos would be able to go “lol a troll sent it to me” and create some doubt in a jury. Remember that (at least in America) the threshold for conviction is supposed to be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” So all the pedos would need to do is create reasonable doubt, by arguing that they never intended to view/own the CSAM.

So instead, the laws are written to close that loophole. It doesn’t matter why you have the CSAM. All that matters is you have it. The feds/courts won’t give a fuck if it was due to you seeking it out or if it was due to a bad actor sending it to you.

that shit just shouldn’t be here

Yes, I agree. Maybe my wording suggested otherwise. But my point was that it wouldn’t be the uploader that’s punished but the instance itself. That’s kinda weird.

Images are grwat when used sparingly

image here

Thankfully I haven’t seen the takes accusing HB of the recent attacks, though being accused of the attacks on .world was a little annoying. I appreciate the solidarity.

I genuinely have no idea where this recent attack is coming from. The most fried part of my brain says “One of the big companies trying to absorb the fediverse is doing this to undermine their competition,” but I have zero evidence, it’s just the only motive I can even think of beyond it being a rogue crank.

It’s totally conceivable that HB people would spam an instance they don’t like – though this would be against the wishes of the mods and admins – but our site culture is completely antithetical to spamming CSAM and things like that, so I don’t think even a rogue group of users would do it “on our behalf”.

Oh, I just realized it could be one of those fash instances like exploding heads. If any were defeded relatively recently, that would make sense.

Instead people are jumping to “OhH it’s ThE HexBeArS” when they have not been able to freely browse you guys’ discussions or even talk with you, they’re just shown the worst take from a minority (although tbf you guys do the same on c/cth, so it’s kinda funny seeing both sides with one not realising the other is also just a human too, just with differing culture and political stance)

I don’t think I have much to contribute to the “both sides” thing that is useful, but I’m going to talk anyway because I’m thinking about it now.

I think if you asked a hexbear user to seriously answer how representative those screenshots are of lemm.ee, they’d probably say that lemm.ee is much more ideologically disjointed on a handful of issues, especially regarding history and geopolitics, and the screenshots are only representative of some of the more annoying tendencies among the neoliberals and poorly-educated “anarchists” (like that dude who decried “tankies” and used Sankara as a counterexample, when we all like Sankara). I also think they would be correct in saying this. I don’t know what the anti-HB people who don’t comment on our instance think, I hardly ever see it, but I can at least tell you that we know much more about neoliberal ideology than they do ML, because we almost all started out as de facto neoliberals and nearly none of them have even a basic understanding of ML theory (which is not really their fault, to be clear).

Anyone on any instance federated with hexbear is welcome to post questions to c/askchapo. If they are relatively polite and not presumptuous, we’ll be happy to answer. If people are still mean, report it. You can let me know and I will personally nag the mods to address the matter properly. Just recently we had a thread from a .ml user who wanted us to state our opinion on Trump for the record for the hundredth time, so about a hundred users chimed in that they all hate his guts (I also made a comment to that effect). We’re happy to discuss things openly and it would be good for us to improve community relations to avoid things like one group accusing the other of doing something as heinous as what the OP describes.