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] 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.

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.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

  • Serinus@lemmy.worldM
    11·
    1 year ago

    The bigger thing is that hash detection tools don’t want to give access to just anyone, and just anyone can run a Lemmy instance. The concern is that you’re effectively giving the CSAM people a way to know if they’ll be detected.

    Perhaps they can allow some of the biggest Lemmy instances to use the tech, but I wouldn’t expect it to be available to everyone.

    • shagie@programming.dev
      61·
      1 year ago

      Facebook and Reddit don’t have local CSAM detection but rather use Google’s APIs.

      This isn’t something that any average user can get access to. Even the largest Lemmy instances are small compared to Reddit and Facebook… and they don’t have local testing either.

      Part of this is also a “this isn’t just detecting and blocking but also automated reporting”.

      Furthermore, Lemmy is AGPL, and providing a Lemmy instance with an implementation that would run the risk that it wouldn’t be able to remain closed source (AGPL license violation).