Sad post, going down for a while

Hey all, first of all I love you all for being here, this started as a small side project and ballooned into a fun area to talk about pop music. Sadly, I have to take the site down for a while while I rethink how I host.

Currently, this site is hosted on my own hardware, on my own network. Something that was never an issue, I had some protections around it to keep it safe.

I won't go into all details, but yesterday someone on another instance uploaded some extremely vile child content that federated to several other instances. Ours was not affected (luckily), but to be safe I purged everything from the last 24 hours.

Unfortuanately, this will be a growing trend, and Lemmy devs haven't done much to protect instance owners. If someone uploaded something like that to a different instance that we subscribed to, technically I would also be hosting that data. (Federation is cool, but it means we are all hosting it), which means the feds could come and beat down my door for hosting it.

In the short term, I'm going to let this go out so others can see it, but I'm hoping it'll be federated for other users while I convert over.

Step 1 is that I cannot host this locally, I need to get it off my network and into the cloud. Steps 2, 3, 4, and on are going to be adding protections so stuff can't ever get in in the first place, integrating tools, and probably working with the lemmy developers on ways to prevent it in the first place.

I don't know how long we'll be down, but unfortunately someone else ruined it for all of us for a bit. I'll do my best to come back up soon while I shore up our ingest.

-Your swiftie admin, Scrubbles