Lemmy's Image Problem (Updated 02-06-2024)

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.

Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.

Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?

The thing that really gets me with these, is that we are 2-4 devs working on software used by over 40k ppl. It is absolutely impossible to please everyone, and fix every issue, there just isn't enough of us.

Oftentimes we ask for ppl to do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, and many of them do.

Anyone can look at our github profiles and see how busy we've been, and how many moderation related issues we've been working on, this is all out in the open. Yet writers of these articles somehow never bother to look, or reach out to us for questions. The amount of entitlement and second-hand rumors is really dissapointing.
- I've reviewed both your and @Nutomic's comments, your latest blog updates, and GitHub PR's, and added a section accordingly: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/lemmy-image-problem/#giving-credit
  
  Thank you for your hard work, and for taking necessary steps to improve something that is essential for instance operators.
Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama.

The day to day drama in corporate software development is MUCH more meaningless than what you're dealing with.
If you can take a moment to move your massive, fragile ego out of the way, you'll realize it's not a hit piece. It's criticism of your behavior in reaction to what is frankly a reasonable set of requests.

Journalism is not just about serving as a propagandic mouthpiece to lionize you and your work. Sometimes, I have to report on subjects that are frankly horrible, people acting shitty, and how people in spaces react to that.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free.

This issue is basic fucking table stakes for user safety and data compliance, and the fact that it still does not exist after four years of being a project is wild to me. It creates liabilities for admins. The fact that it's still a problem, right now, illustrates that these things are not direct concerns in how you design software.

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side.

Your comments were in the GitHub issues.
- massive fragile ego, frankly horrible, acting shitty
  
  So this is how you see me, all based on two issues out of thousands and never having talked with me directly. Honestly this comment would be a good reason to ban you for harassment and violating the site's code of conduct. But lucky for you I don't care what random strangers on the internet think about me.
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?

This isn't "one user" being "so demanding". Its a trend. Read what others have said. Learn from your mistakes. Your community of instance admins are pissed because you're constantly throwing them under the bus. And, yes, your moderation tools are crap. Thats objective.

And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
- Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.
  
  Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.
- delirious_owl is a troll people stop feeding it.
- Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
  
  Fam, this is Free Software. Capitalism is that way → www.reddit.com .

Well, yeah...

If you upload a picture to Lemmy, it's going to get saved by a shit of federated instances.

That's how federation works, but once it happens, it's hard to get all of them to delete it.

The fix is easy:

Upload somewhere else (theres a bunch of images hosts) then make your post point to that image host. Federated instances just have to host the link, so it's good for them too.

I'd love to see something like the RES feature where Lemmy can still show an expandable thumbnail for non-hosted images. RES pulled it off fine years ago, not sure how hard it would be.

But that would fix all these issues

So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn't actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.

I agree that with federation, it's a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.

The biggest issue I have is that there's really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.
I have to say, I think the article actually does address what you’re saying, in particular here:

There are a couple of reasons as to why this is so surprising. Firstly, the Trust & Safety aspect: a few months ago, several Lemmy servers were absolutely hammered with CSAM, to the point that communities shut down and several servers were forced to defederate from one another or shut down themselves.

Simply put, the existing moderation tooling is not adequate for removing illegal content from servers. It’s bad enough to have to jump through hoops dealing with local content, but when it comes to federated data, it’s a whole other ball game.

The second, equally important aspect is one of user consent. If a user accidentally uploads a sensitive image, or wants to wipe their account off of a server, the instance should make an effort to comply with their wishes. Federated deletions fail sometimes, but an earnest attempt to remove content from a local server should be trivial, and attempting to perform a remote delete is better than nothing.

I also just want to point out that the knife cuts both ways. Yes, it’s impossible to guarantee nodes you’re federating with aren’t just ignoring remote delete requests. But, there is a benefit to acting in good faith that I think is easy to infer from the CSAM material example the article presents.
Upload somewhere else (theres a bunch of images hosts) then make your post point to that image host. Federated instances just have to host the link, so it’s good for them too.

Those images are still cached as well as the thumbnails.
Couldn't images and videos just be loaded from the instance they were uploaded to instead of getting copied to each instance? It would work almost the same as uploading it to a file hoster but it would be a lot easier usability wise and illegal content would still only have to be deleted at a single point.
- This is what i was gonna say
Yeah it's like trying to delete a torrent that you created lol, deleting stuff from the Internet is not so easy. Even websites that claim to allow you to delete stuff may still be backed up by The Wayback Machine or similar, or even just a random user who liked your post and downloaded it.

I would like improvements here, but you should probably still be careful about anything you post if you're worried about being able to delete it, no matter what site you're on.

At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem has relied on have been third-party tools, such as db0’s fantastic Fediseer and Fedi-Safety initiatives. While I’m sure many people are glad these tools exist, the fact that instances have to rely on third-party solutions is downright baffling.

I'm not sure I see the issue here, what's the point of an open ecosystem if you don't make use of any third party tools? Fedi-safety in particular feels like it should not be part of the core project

There's nothing wrong with having good third-party tools, that was not my point. db0 in particular has done some amazing, amazing work.

What's fucked, however, is having a project:

whose core infrastructure only offers the most threadbare tools

there's zero consideration from development on privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed

the devs are stone silent when waves of CSAM crash through instances

they openly mock people or say they're "too busy to do this" when it comes to meeting the most basic expectations of how a social platform ought to work.

Like, this is not an attack on Lemmy itself, I think the platform can be a real force for good in the Fediverse. But let's be honest, this project is not going to live very long if nothing changes.

Basic things like having the ability to easily remove images from storage should be part of the core platform. The fact that this still isn't a thing even four years into the project is insane.
- The first time some random user files a sue in court the admins of their instance will be in trouble.
  
  Lemmy devs are not affected, but instance admins are and according to the GDPR they are considered "data controllers" and are responsible for the processing of users' data.
  
  As far as I understand it, this lacking feature is an open "challenge" to existing regulation and legislators, maybe also to open people's eyes about the fact that privacy claims are often not enforced even by those who claim to do so.
- Its simply not true that we have zero consideration for privacy or user safety. But that is only one aspect of Lemmy, we also have to work on many other things. And we werent silent during the CSAM wave, but most of it was handled by admins and all the related issues are long resolved. Lemmy has 50k active users, its obvious that we are too busy to work on every single thing that some individual user demands.
  
  There is a reason that Lemmy still has version 0.x. If you have such high demands then you shouldnt use it, and switch to another platform instead. And yes you are clearly stoking an attack against Lemmy, I wonder why you hate our project so much.

Lemmy's Image Problem

I see what you did there...

Top tip: don’t take nude photos of yourself. Ever.

Even though i don't do it i think people should've a right to do what they want with their body without fearing what others think or will do.
- That’s what I said! But noooooooooo. They insisted on arresting me.
  
  IT’S A PUBIC PARK! it’s right there in the name!!!

Moderation is obviously important, but what are the realities around deletion in a federated ecosystem?

I feel like the push around this and GDPR are similar to the DMs situation in mastodon, where you might feel like you’ve deleted your stuff but it’s actually very much out there still.

I’m sure there’s a middle ground where some amount of deletion occurs and it’s better than nothing. But as with the BlueSky bridge conversation, it seems to me having a frank conversation about the kind of system we’re dealing with here is just as important.

Yeah, I agree. I think the important thing is "was the local content scrubbed?" Because at least if that was done, the place of origin no longer has it.

Federated deletes will always be imperfect, but I'd rather have them than not have them.

What might actually be interesting would be if someone could figure out this type of content negotiation: deletes get federated, some servers miss it. Maybe there's a way to get servers to check the cache and, if a corresponding origin value is no longer there, dump it?
- Well I’m sure there are a number of nice ways of arranging federated delete, including your suggestion, but it seems to me that the issue is guaranteeing a delete across all federated servers where the diversity of software and the openness/opt-out-ness of federation basically ensure something somewhere will not respect a request out of either malice, ignorance or error.
  
  Ultimately, it seems a weird thing to be creating and expecting fediverse platforms in the image of those designed with complete central control over all data and servers. Like we’re still struggling to break out of the mould.
  
  Even if one platform makes a perfect arrangement for something like delete, so long as servers running that platform push to / federate with servers that run something else, where it’s ultimately impossible to tell what they’re running because it’s someone else’s server, there will be broken promises.
  
  I’m interested to hear your response on this actually, because it increasingly seems to me like we haven’t got to terms yet with what decentralisation actually means and how libertarian some of its implications are once you care about these sorts of issues.
  
  I suspect it gets to the point where for social activity some people may start realising that they actually want a centralised body they can hold to account.
  
  And that feeling secure on a decentralised social media platform requires significant structural adjustments, like e2ee, allow-list federation, private spaces, where public spaces are left for more blog like and anonymous interactions.
  
  Also, sorry, end rant.

Because of this, I never upload directly an image to Lemmy and others, using instead a sharing tool (FileCoffee, IMHO the best). With my account there I can easily delete the hosted image with which it disappear everywhere.

It's not a bad thought, but the way some Fediverse software works, it can still get proxied and/or cached locally.
- That is a general problem in the internet, not only in Lemmy, images andother content can be copied, this you can't avoid, it would even be imposible if you could delete embedded images in Lemmy, someone could have copied and pasted it somewhere else. But by using an imagesharer where you later delete the image, you also eliminate your origin as the author, since it no longer appears in your contributions in Lemmy or other sites.

tbh I just assume that despite GDPR or CCPA any images I put up are there forever, it's not like the tech is that different in the fediverse from anywhere else. nowhere is going to be scrubbing their storage drive blocks on delete if it even can be deleted

I take it you've never run a community instance. The problem is, laws vary by jurisdiction, and can have a very real effect on how you run your server when shit hits the fan.

We recently ran a story about a guy building his own Fediverse community and platform, who just happened to be a bit naive about the network. He's off in his corner, doing his own thing, people find his project and assume it's some kind of weird scraper. After disinformation came out about it, someone remote-loaded child pornography to his server, for the purpose of filling a report with the police.

The guy is based on Germany. Local jurisdiction requires one year of prison time minimum. It matters.

...image hosting is actually handled as an auxiliary service called pict-rs, which runs alongside a given Lemmy instance. While pict-rs itself works fine for handling uploads, downloads, and modifications to pictures, the devs neglected to add anything to Lemmy’s interface to handle deletions. In fact, the platform as a whole lacks any tooling for moderating images whatsoever.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights.

We don't have to agree on every point (or at all), but I've decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/

...

It's pretty fucked up you post your blogs, read people's comments, and use those to write your next blog post.

Like, real fucked up ...
- Not sure I'm seeing what's fucked up about this. It's not like they're using people's comments as their own work. They link back to this thread. It just seems like a place where they can dump a bunch of their own thoughts related to a topic without posting it here since it's not necessarily in line with this thread's topic anymore. And I thought it was an interesting read and appreciated them posting it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- I'm a long-time contributor to the space, and have been here for over 15 years. I was on the Fediverse when it was literally one or two platforms, and I witnessed the whole thing grow and evolve. I've seen the entire thing take shape, and change with every subsequent wave of platform, user migration, and major pivot.
  
  I also ran community management for one of the large-scale early projects here.
  
  A huge motivating factor of mine has been to write about a nascent and evolving space that I'm passionate about, often because no one else has been writing about it. I grew my own publication, We Distribute, out of it, and it's my responsibility to report on different aspects of what happens in the space. Sometimes, the news is ugly.
  
  My personal blog at my domain is unrelated to that, and is more just random brain droppings based on whenever I feel like putting out personal thoughts based on my experiences. There's nothing malicious about that.