sh.itjust.works Main Community

It's been a wild month since I've been here, but it feels like home.

Thank you for hosting this instance.

Keep us updated on the ability to donate for hosting costs please!

Over the past few days , possibly longer, someone has been making new accounts and using them to post scat porn in various communities here. Like, gifs of poop coming from buttholes.

What the fuck and can we do something about it?

{"msg":"Error in store"}

Or the longer version:

< HTTP/2 500
< server: nginx
< date: Sat, 15 Jul 2023 06:45:55 GMT
< content-type: application/json
< content-encoding: gzip
< access-control-expose-headers: content-encoding, vary, content-type, date, content-length
< vary: accept-encoding, Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
<
* Connection #0 to host sh.itjust.works left intact
{"msg":"Error in store"}

Doesn't seem like that acronym is used for anything important at the moment, I'm sure we can grab it.

Welp this is my first post and looks like my exit from Reddit post. The only app I used for Reddit has officially died. Time to go all in on Lemmy and hope that the developer makes JoeyForLemmy. I like Joey, it was great.

So each server is hosted on someone's server they personally pay for? Who owns shitjustworks? If they pay for server space, wouldn't reposting meme be more expensive as they would like to have posts saved for years?

I have occasionally posted like, cat photos to social media trusting that identifying metadata is removed, since the mouth breathers that design things like smart phones put social security numbers and goddamn GPS data in every picture that's taken. Does Lemmy strip that data out, or am I gonna have to blank that myself?

Is there a way i can make a card style view as my default view? I like to see pictures right away without having to click twice.

TYSM

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1418762

I've made a number of improvements since the last time I was posting about my extension. The update is now available on both Firefox and Chrome web stores.

For questions / support: [email protected]

TLDR: See the respective download pages on Firefox & Chrome. The screenshots and features list are mostly self-explanatory.

Note on versions:

• Firefox has a more recent 1.2.1 version, because my build script missed some files while uploading v1.2.0. It doesn't look like Chrome had this issue.
• I'm uploading v1.2.2 to both stores today, which will bring the two missing features to Chrome as well. After 1.2.2, all browsers should have the same features. See below for details.

So how is this different from other similar extensions?

You may have noticed the extension's name changed to be more generic (and include Kbin 🥳). I'm trying to make this a more well-rounded extension, and that means I've incorporated some features from the other extensions, in my own way.

Lemmy Links, Kbin Links, and the other forks:

This is a great extension that replaces links on your page with versions that go to your home instance. However, in order for this to work, it needs to recursively check every element on your page whenever DOM content (the stuff the browser is reading) changes. This is somewhat resource intensive, and while testing I ran into lag and freezing issues. As such, I decided to not include this functionality in the same way.

Instead, I've added a right click context menu that does the same thing. This way the user can pick which links they want the extension to convert, and it's a lot more efficient resource wise. While it's an extra click, I felt this was a reasonable compromise. However, I'm open to feedback!

NOTE: The context menu is available on Firefox, and it will be available in Chrome in about a week, depending on when they approve my update.

Lemmy Home Instance Helper

This is another extension which checks if you are logged in to an instance, and it creates a button to the search page if you are not. As my extension creates a button on any foreign instance, the search page is only helpful when a community hasn't been loaded into your home instance yet (ex. because you're the first one to try accessing it).

To deal with this, my extension modifies the "Community not found" pages with more instructions, as well as buttons to trigger the fetch process or to open the community elsewhere. See this screenshot for an example. Again, open to feedback!

As always, I'd love to collaborate with other people while building this. I'm still cleaning up my code, but feel free to look at the GitHub. If this extension gets popular, I will definitely need help for translations and for things like getting the extension on Safari (I don't have a recent Apple device to sign the extension with).

Note on permissions:

• The current versions request "Access to all sites". This is because the extension needs access to any page that contains "/c/", "/m/", or "/post/" in order to create the sidebar buttons. While the extension only looks for those pages, it will show up as "Access to all sites" when installing. Once I have a proper welcome message and settings page, I plan on making this permission optional so you can just use the popup menu if you would like.

Summary of Recent Changes:

• Added support for Kbin
• Fixed issue where button wouldn't load when navigating to a community within Lemmy (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week).
• (NEW) Right-click context menu on Lemmy/Kbin community links to let you open them directly. You can test them out here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303 (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week)
• (NEW) Information and buttons added to "Community Not Found" error pages to let you fetch the community or open it elsewhere.
• Updates to sidebar button to state the current selected instance and provide more detailed instructions as a dropdownList
• Refactored the code to remove more unnecessary permissions.
• Another pile of bugfixes, UI improvements, and better wording for instructions.

Future Plans:

• This is complete and will be in v1.2.2. ~~Bringing over the new changes to Google Chrome. Since chrome requires Manifest 3, I still need to iron out some issues with the service workers. The missing features are all related to the background processes that are running on the Firefox version~~
• Pushing to other browsers: Microsoft Edge & Opera are still reviewing v1.2.0. Unfortunately, I don't have any immediate plans for Safari, as I don't have a device that can sign the extension. I am looking into getting help for that.
• Setting up a proper Welcome page, Settings page, and Options menu to allow users to turn off features that they don't like. This will also let me make "access to all sites" optional.
• Finishing the translations' setup so that people can contribute other languages to the extension.
• Adding an option to save your own instances to the popup, for those that have multiple home instances.

Apologies if this is covered in a FAQ somewhere, I couldn't find anything!

If I'm part of a community here, but the sole moderator has been AWOL, is there a process for getting more mods assigned just so any issues can be dealt with until the original mod hopefully returns? I tried searching for a requests community or a support ticket email address etc and came up empty handed but I might just have missed it.

Thanks for any info.

(Not OP, but some people might like these explainations)

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. When sorting by New on All, there are a couple posts on the top of the feed from the future.

Had a realization with the cross-posting feature, so I'm giving it a try.

This isn't my community, nor even my home instance, and the fun idea is if this pans out as I think it should, small communities can get some attention, and each community/instance cross-posted to in turn gets some attention!

I mean, I just love this instance. I wanted to ask a question on a community I didn't want traced back to me and I opened my tor browser and just freaking created an account here without having to answer questions and without having to provide an email and posted a post within 5 mins! I don't know of any other lemmy instance which lets me do that. Well done to the person who created this instance, I love it and imma stay on it.

Hi everyone. I wanted to share some Lemmy-related activism I’ve been up to. I got really interested in the apparent surge of bot accounts that happened in June. Recently, I was able to play a small part in removing some of them. Hopefully by getting the word out we can ensure Lemmy is a place for actual human users and not legions of spam bots.

First some background. This won't be new to many of you, but I'll include it anyway. During the week of June 18 to June 25, as the Reddit migration to Lemmy was in full swing, there was a surge of suspicious account creation on Lemmy instances that had open registration and no captcha or email verification. Hundreds of thousands of accounts appeared and then sat inactive. We can only guess what they’re for, but I assume they are being planted for future malicious use (spamming ads, subversive electioneering, influencing upvotes to drive content to our front pages, etc.)

If you look at the stats on The Federation you might notice that even the shape of the Total Users graphs are the same across many instances. User numbers ramped up on June 18, grew almost linearly throughout the week, and peaked on June 24. (I’m puzzled by the slight drop at the end. I assume it's due to some smoothing or rate-sensitive averaging that The Federation uses for the graphs?)

Here are total user graphs for a few representative instances showing the typical shape:

Clearly this is suspicious, and I wasn’t the only one to notice. Lemmy.ninja documented how they discovered and removed suspicious accounts from this time period: (https://lemmy.ninja/post/30492). Several other posts detailed how admins were trying to purge suspicious accounts. From June 24 to June 30 The Federation showed a drop in the total number of Lemmy users from 1,822,313 to 1,589,412. That’s 232,901 suspicious accounts removed! Great success! Right?

Well, no, not yet. There are still dozens of instances with wildly suspicious user numbers. I took data from The Federation and compared total users to active users on all listed instances. The instances in the screenshot below collectively have 1.22 million accounts but only 46 active users. These look like small self-hosted instances that have been infected by swarms of bot accounts.

As of this writing The Federation shows approximately 1.9 million total Lemmy accounts. That means the majority of all Lemmy accounts are sitting dormant on these instances, potentially to be used for future abuse.

This bothers me. I want Lemmy to be a place where actual humans interact. I don’t want it to become another cesspool of spam bots and manipulative shenanigans. The internet has enough places like that already.

So, after stewing on it for a few days, I decided to do something. I started messaging admins at some of these instances, pointing out their odd account numbers and referencing the lemmy.ninja post above. I suggested they consider removing the suspicious accounts. Then I waited.

And they responded! Some admins were simply unaware of their inflated user counts. Some had noticed but assumed it was a bug causing Lemmy to report an incorrect number. Others weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their instances and starting over. In any case, several instance admins checked their databases, agreed the accounts were suspicious, and managed to delete them. I’m told that the lemmy.ninja post was very helpful.

Check out these early results!

Awesome! Another 144k suspicious accounts are gone. A few other admins have said they are working on doing the same on their instances. I plan to message the admins at all the instances where the total accounts to active users ratio is above 10,000. Maybe, just maybe, scrubbing these suspected bot accounts will reduce future abuse and prevent this place from becoming the next internet cesspool.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Also, special thanks to the following people:

@[email protected] for your helpful post!

@[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] for being so quick to take action on your instances!

Is there a write up for the Lemmy exploit that happened? Or can someone give me any specific? I’m a cybersecurity student and would like to learn a bit more.

EDIT: Awesome, thanks for the links guys!

I hope it's alright to ask a question here, because I'm very curious about an important facet of this instance:

I noticed this morning that when I visit some of the communities hosted on other instances, I'm seeing an incorrect vote count, and few to no comments. Is this due to the recent breach, and does it relate to defederating from other instances temporarily?

Example: https://lemmy.zip/c/gaming 85 total comments https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected] 12 total comments

I was in behaw and jerboa in my phone. And those are down all the time.

When I go to my profile, I can see all of my comments and posts that I've saved, but I can't see my own posts (even though it does say that I have two). There is no post score, either.

Anyone else have this issue or know how to resolve it?

I've been having a hard time finding the "perfect" Mastodon instance (for me).

Mastodon.social is obviously the biggest one, but every time I check the Explore tab, it's people complaining about Twitter/Threads/Reddit/Whatever. It's mostly people from a side of Twitter that I never really interacted with. I want a little bit more humor in my feed.

I'm curious what instances the people of sh.itjust.works are using. Hopefully I can find one that vibes with me.

There’s plenty of posts on the topic about Lemmy.world being compromised, followed by the exploit being tracked back to an XSS exploit that I believe works on instances with custom emojis enabled. Many instances have been quick to jump on this such as feddit.uk and Behaw which took itself down temporarily.

Does this affect sh.itjust.works?

If so what are the admins doing about it?

Can we get some sort of admin post about this? Last update from them was some time ago.

Hopefully the admins have 2FA enabled on their accounts.

Hello everyone. Hope you're doing well.