There have been users spamming CSAM content in [email protected] causing it to federate to other instances. If your instance is subscribed to this community, you should take action to rectify it immediately. I recommend performing a hard delete via command line on the server.
I deleted every image from the past 24 hours personally, using the following command: sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs/files -type f -ctime -1 -exec shred {} \;
Note: Your local jurisdiction may impose a duty to report or other obligations. Check with these, but always prioritize ensuring that the content does not continue to be served.
Update
Apparently the Lemmy Shitpost community is shut down as of now.
Someone is trying really hard to hurt Lemmy by continually attacking the most popular instance. Is this all coming from right-wingers upset that their nazi instances were defederated across basically the whole fediverse?
My tin foil hat is telling me it’s one of the other social media companies funding a hacking group to do it. They stand to have the most to lose, and they’ve seemingly decided to enjoy changing the narrative regarding multiple topics. Lemmy stands directly against what the bigger social medias stand for.
I have no evidence to back this though. As a business owner I just know that things become very consistent when people are being paid, and very inconsistent when they aren’t. These attacks are seemingly very consistent/organized.
You think a company that is posed to go public is going to attack a competitor with a minuscule amount of traffic with extremely illegal material that could put them in prison for even having?
When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax...), or yet another that will sell out it's host country's citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).
But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you'd need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don't like the idea of lemmy, and it'll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.
This makes the most sense to me. It's a pretty vitriolic attack, therefore I don't think it's simply a troll while at the same time I don't believe it's any corporate social media.
Considering all the alt-right garbage that was popping up there the last couple of days this seems at least plausible. I sometimes envy their ability to utterly destroy anything they touch.
I wouldn't put it past the hexbear crazies throwing a tantrum. They claim to be left wing... Sure seem more like fascist trumper types though. Maybe it's just that they're all incels and incels all seem about the same.
Throwing a tantrum about what exactly? They're one of the oldest-running Lemmy instances. Until now they were running a fork based on a pre-Federation version of the codebase.
You believe they did a bunch of work migrating their database only to then negate that work by destroying the community they wanted to Federate with?
they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.
Downvote from me there. I’ve seen plenty of examples of hexbear people being nice, interesting and good sports. They definitely seem to have more of shitposting culture than is normal on mainstream lemmy. But all in all it’s seemed fun to me from what I’ve seen.
Beyond all that, this is just superficial and prejudicial. If you had some examples to link to or more substantial insights to share as to why it’d be “them”, that’d be worth reading.
Otherwise, they’re an instance. Not one person, I’m sure some on hexbear are assholes and some awesome.
I see where you're going with this, but no, people really are just absolutely horrible. The fact is that with other social media they're just already very set up in managing this so we never see it. Lemmy wants to be open, this is the flipside of that openness.
It's generally easy to crap on what's 'bad' about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.
A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.
While I hope that's not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.
I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.
To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.
It's going to take time, and I wouldn't be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.
There have been studies which found playing tetris for an hour or two after seeing something traumatic can prevent it taking root in our longterm memory.
I tried it once after accidentally clicking a link on reddit that turned out to be gore, I can't remember exactly what it was now (about 9 months later) so it must have worked
Yeah you really can’t. I’m pretty desensitized from earlier internet with death and other shock gore content but had managed to avoid CSAM until today. It was a lot worse than I expected, felt my heart drop. Worse, my app autoplays gifs in thumbnail so it kept going while I was reporting it.
I’ve mostly forgotten and it wasn’t on my mind until I saw this thread (happened less than 24hr ago) but even the slightest reminder is oddly upsetting. Wish I’d thought of the Tetris thing.
Likely scum moves from reddit patriots to destroy or weaken the fediverse.
I remember when Murdoch hired that Israeli tech company in Haifa to find weaknesses is TV smart cards and then leaked it to destroy their market by flooding counterfit smart cards.
They are getting desperate along with those DDOS attacks.
Could be, but more likely it's just the result of having self hosted services, you have individuals exposing their own small servers to the wilderness of internet.
These trols also try constantly to post their crap to mainstream social media but they have it more difficult there. My guess is that they noticed lemmy is getting a big traction and has very poor media content control. Easy target.
Moderating media content is a difficult task and for sure centralized social media have better filters and actual humans in place to review content. Sadly, only big tech companies can pay for such infrastructure to moderate media content.
I don't see an easy way for federated servers to cope with this.
Yeah exactly. This is the main reason I decided not to attempt to self host a Lemmy instance. No way am I going to let anyone outside of my control have the ability to place a file of their choosing on my hardware. Big nope for me.
I got lucky. I am not subscribed to this community, and I am the only person on my instance. But what if I was subscribed and hadn't seen this post? This is too much responsibility for me.
I just shut down my instance until we can disable cached images. If that never happens, then I'm not bringing it back up.
Shout-out to https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate. I moved my subscriptions over in a minute or two, and now, other than not having my post history, it's exactly the same.
Yeah... Just wow. I disabled pictrs and deleted all its images, which also means all my community images/uploaded images are gone, and it's more of a hassle to see other people's images, but in the end I think it's worth it.
Through caching every image pictrs was also taking up a massive amount of space on my Pi, which I also use for Nextcloud. So that's another plus!
There has to be a more elegant way of dealing with this in the future, like de-coupling between Lemmy-account hosting (which effectively means acitivypub-fediverse account) and Lemmy-communities hosting.
Child sexual abuse material - underage porn. For obvious reasons, you don't want this to be something you're hosting automatically out of your basement server.
At this point, the community is clean. So unless more is posted, then you should be good. If someone searched for the community and caused a preview to load while the content was active though, then it could be an issue.
I was looking into self hosting. What can I do to avoid dealing with this? Can I not cache images? Would I get in legal trouble for being federated with an instance being spammed?
I checked and there shouldn't be any images stored on the server when running lemmy 1.18.4. The post was made in high emotional distress and shouldn't be taken at a face value. If the posts are bothering you I advise purging the posts in question. (I have already done that)
I'm on 1.18.4, once I deleted the most recent images, the former CSAM posts(among others) became broken images. So yes, it was pulling from local disk cache. Then I took care of the posts themselves after the content was invalidated.
How did you check this? From my understanding, images from external servers are copied (and transcoded) over locally. At least in my server (running 0.18.4), they do.
It depends on how the image posted, the thumbnails might get federated. If the image is used in a post/comment body, usually the thumbnails are not federated.
I shut down the pictrs or whatever docker container on my instance so all I host is containers and the database. All the images that I see on my instance are external links. I can check by just looking at the rendered HTML.
I'm not subscribed to that community, but I guess I'm glad Pictrs doesn't work for me, since I am using the Yunohost version of Lemmy. The creators of the Yunohost package couldn't get it to work. I haven't really missed it honestly.
It just means that you can't upload pictures, including banners or avatars. However, when I want to create an image post, I just make the post on Pixelfed and then mention the Lemmy community I want to post to at the bottom of the post body. Supposedly there's a way to reference a remote image for a banner or an avatar, but I haven't figured that out yet.
Looks fairly sane, finds every file in the given directory that was created in the last 24 hours and deletes them. Personally if you are dealing with CSAM I'd be using shred instead of just rm
You'll need to find where the actual container files are being stored. I'm unfortunately not familiar with Lemmy Easy Deploy, but you should have a folder that has some files/folders like docker-compose.yml, volumes, lemmy.hjson.
The important one is the volumes/pictrs/files folder, take the full path of that folder and replace it with the /srv/lemmy/example.com... path from the original post, and then that command should work.
As far as I know, images should not be federating to federated instances, right? Image proxying is supposed to be added to pictrs version 0.5.0 but it is still in alpha.
That's what we're pushing the lemmy devs to do. Honestly even if they want to use proprietary tools for this instance I'm okay, I'll happily go register an Azure account and plop an API key into the UI so it can start scanning. Lemmy should have the guardrails to prevent this from ever hitting our servers.
In the meantime, services like cloudflare will handle the recognizing and blocking access to images like that, but the problem still comes down to the federation of images. Most small hosters do not want the risk of hosting images from the whole of the internet, and it sounds like there is code in the works to disable that. Larger hosters who allow open registrations can do what they please and host what they please, but for us individual hosters we really need tools to block this.
Not really. You could technically locate the images and determine precisely which ones they are from their filenames, but that means you actually have to view the images long enough to pull the URL. I had no desire to view them for even a moment, and just universally removed them.
As mentioned in my edit above though, ensure you are in compliance with local regulations when dealing with the material in case you have to do any preservation for law enforcement or something.