Mastodawn

lwadmin Aug 28, 2023

Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

https://lemmy.world/post/4018526

Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice - Lemmy.world

Hello everyone, We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy. We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now. Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this. Edit: @[email protected] [https://lemmy.world/u/Striker] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance. The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy. But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

I’m afraid the fediverse will need a crowdsec-like decentralized banning platform. Get banned one platform for this shit, get banned everywhere.

I’m willing to participate in fleshing that out.

Hello Hotel Aug 29, 2023

Mabe FIDO for identity purposes is a good idea. Mabe some process that takes a week to calculate an identity token and an approval and rejection system for known tokens

Katana314 Aug 29, 2023

What you’re basically talking about is centralization. And, as much as it has tremendous benefits of convenience, I think a lot of people here can cite their own feelings as to why that’s generally bad. It’s a hard call to make.

rbar Aug 30, 2023

They didn’t say anything about implementation. Why couldn’t you build tooling to keep it decentralized? Servers or even communities could choose to ban from their own communities based on a heuristic based on the moderation actions published by other communities. At the end of the day it is still individual communities making their own decisions.

I just wouldn’t be so quick to shoot this down.

Rambi Aug 31, 2023

There is something similar to that for Minecraft servers, it’s a website/ plugin where people’s bans get added to and other admins can check usernames on there to see if they’re a troll or whatever and ban them straight away before they cause issues. So it’s definitely possible to do in a decentralised way.

newIdentity Aug 29, 2023

Soo… You want to centrelize a decentralized platform…

ptrck Aug 29, 2023

You can have a local banlist supplemented by a shared banlist containing these CSAM individuals for example.

thisisawayoflife Aug 29, 2023

That ban list could be a set of rich objects. The user that was banned, date of action, community it happened in, reason, server it happened at. Sysops could choose to not accept any bans from a particular site. Make things fairly granular so there’s flexibility to account for bad actor sysops.

newIdentity Aug 30, 2023

But how do you know that these people actually spread CSAM and someone isn’t abusing their power?

BradleyUffner Aug 29, 2023

There is no way that could get abused… Like say, by hosting your own instance and banning anyone you want.

johnthebeboptist Aug 29, 2023

Am I missing some downside here? I’m genuinely curious. So what if an instance that’s acting in bad faith bans me? Something like that would most likely get around fairly quickly and why would anyone acting in good faith want to be a part of something like that?

ptrck Aug 29, 2023

Anything can be abused, but you can also build proper safeguards.

Hello Hotel Aug 29, 2023

It might be in the works, comment

Lil' Bobby Tables Aug 30, 2023

I think a ban list is, unfortunately, contrary to the notion of decentralization; as otherwise warranted as it is in this instance.

What about a centralized list of data on major offenders, which could be made subscribable by instances? Perhaps a way of calculating probability of origin, matched with offenses made by that origin in the past? That way an instance could take it under advisory, and take actions suiting them?

This is only the beginning of an idea, but if it is possible to collaborate without centralizing, we should explore it.

CreeperODeath Aug 30, 2023

I feel like this would be difficult to enforce

Whitehat Hacker Sep 1, 2023

Do people think that someone has to use the same email address, or the same username? If someone uses a different email, username, and IP address (don’t try and argue semantics it can, always can, and always has been done) then whatever you put into the list can’t be applied to them.

Even if you ask for IDs people can fake those, it’s illegal sure but so is what these assholes did and it didn’t really stop them now did it.

Draconic NEO Aug 30, 2023

We already have that, it’s called prison. Can’t go on the internet from Prison (at least I’d assume so, wouldn’t make much sense if people could). That’s not 100% since people need to be caught for it to work but once they are it certainly is.

Though other Global ban solutions don’t really work well because they require a certain level of compliance that criminals aren’t going to follow though with (i.e. Not commiting identity theft). They can also be abused by malicious actors to falsely ban people (especially with the whole identity theft thing).