this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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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?

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[–] TheDude 125 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Honestly these type of scat spamming has been really discouraging on me. I spend time and money so that the community can have a reliable and nice instance to call home, only to have a few (not sure what to call them) people try to ruin it for everyone. If these people are reading this comment, just know that every time you make these kinds of unwanted posts you are taking my time away from my family and young kids to address the reports.

My nights lately have been mostly used for coding some extra moderation tools that will moderate these in the future.

I sincerely apologize for all of you who have been exposed to literal shit images over the last week. I’m working as fast as I can and will implement something soon.

In the meanwhile i’ve added a few new admins to help with this moderation.

[–] DadVolante 29 points 1 year ago

Thanks for being the Dude, my dude. Sorry for the static.

Take breaks when you need to. This is new to all of us.

You're appreciated

[–] ComfortablyGlum 26 points 1 year ago

You and your family come first. I really appreciate all you do to make this instance available and work, but if this ever becomes a burden rather than a pleasure, I truly hope you will step away.

[–] verity_kindle 23 points 1 year ago

You are appreciated, TheDude. I'm sorry you have to sacrifice family time putting out fires, that's not right. There is definitely a wave of communities making an effort to recruit volunteer mods. Unfortunately, they need experienced mods and those that fit the bill seem...burnt-out? Weary? I volunteered as an mod for one and they said, thanks, love your attitude, do you speak Ukrainian? :) What else can a Lemmit do to help?

[–] Shit 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for helping! I've been trying to remove/ban people from my community when I see it get reported.

[–] kersploosh 12 points 1 year ago

Thank you for spending your personal time and money on SJW. We appreciate it! Make sure your family and your own well-being come first, though. Those are way more important than us random people on the internet.

[–] Blaze 5 points 1 year ago

Take care of your family first! Thank you for your support

[–] verity_kindle 3 points 1 year ago

Also, don't get burned out! Take care of your mental health. You're doing the Lord's work, He will prosper YOUR work and provide you what you need to fight evil.

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[–] Voroxpete 53 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're also sending them as messages.

This exposes a number of very serious issues with Lemmy.

  1. The inexplicable lack of a delete option for messages in your inbox.
  2. The fact that blocking a user does not remove or hide messages they've sent you from your inbox.
  3. The lack of a report button.
  4. The fact that it's possible to send direct messages with inline images and have those images immediately show up for the end user (absolutely incredible that not one person ever said "Yo, what happens when people use this to send dick pics?")

I've gotten some from @thewatcher already. Hopefully some mod or server admin can get on the job of banning them.

[–] can 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Re: 3. Lemmy 100% has a report button. In the the vertical dot menu under a comment on the webui.

And in your dm's its the flag button. Lemmy messages aren't truly private so admins should be able to see and take action.

[–] Voroxpete 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, I tried it, and it just sits there and spins an "in progress" wheel. No idea if those reports actually went through or not.

[–] can 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If it's anything like when that happens while commenting then I think it goes through.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Instances likely need global moderators or a team of admins that can address the issue. The growth of Lemmy and Kbin left the larger communities without enough volunteer staff to deal with the influx.

The instances would also benefit from a bit of cross-site collaboration. If a terrible user is spamming / botting / trolling, having a "league of allied instances" willing to ban and block the user on all of them would be beneficial.

[–] can 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

All you can really do is report it. Message admins if it stays up too long. Other than that just hope they get bored

[–] Voroxpete 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there such a thing as a report button in Lemmy, because I can't seem to find one?

[–] RunAwayFrog 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Click the "more" button (three vertical dots), then the flag button!

[–] Voroxpete 3 points 1 year ago

"Flag" is an extremely unhelpful label for a report function, but that's not your fault. Thank you for letting me know.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Probably spez in a pathetic attempt to shit on the lemmy platform :-P

[–] Quacksalber 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

feddit.de defederated this instance over this spam. Really makes me sour towards Lemmy as a concept. Now I can't access all of the German speaking communities, just because one guy keeps spamming scat porn? And the feddit.de admin apparently only seeing defederation as the only option? Fuck that.

[–] Eezyville 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That says more about that admin then about Lemmy.

[–] ZekeSulastin 3 points 1 year ago

At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if we defederated the source instance of all this crap just to stop the bleeding - it was stated by Beehaw and clearly obvious now that Lenny’s moderation tools are lacking.

[–] Quacksalber 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does, but it's the way Lemmy is designed that gives the admin so much "power" to take chunks of the fediverse offline for others

[–] BigDanishGuy 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But what keeps you from creating a feddit.de account? What we really need is a client that can navigate multiple instances with separate accounts seamlessly.

[–] Quacksalber 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't want to create multiple accounts just so I can access all the content, that is not why I am here for. Furthermore, I don't want to write an essay who I am and why I want to join feddit.de.

[–] h3rm17 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a you problem.

The fact that you can defederate is actually one of the big, important points of... well, federation. Freedom of association.

As other commenter said, you are free to join feddit.de (and any other instance). They are independent instances, like different webpages. If the content is important to you, and it is not accessible from here, just join them!

But let's not blame federated networks since this is exactly one of their sellong points.

[–] Quacksalber 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy is being sold as a Reddit alternative. I for one want it to succeed at that. A fractured Fediverse however won't be able to entice anyone not directly affected by Reddit's changes to join, for the same reason why separate forums weren't able to survive once Reddit got traction.

Saying stuff like "it's a good thing admins from one instance can cut you off from all communities hosted on that instance, if you have your account on the blocked instance" doesn't track.

[–] h3rm17 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is a reddit alternative, just not a reddit clone. There are a LOT of reddit alternatives, and this one is a FEDERATED reddit alternative. In the same way that mastodon is a federated microblogging alternative.

It does not change the fact that it IS a reddit alternative, but again, if someone feels lost or does not want it to be federated, they can go use lobster or whatever.

[–] Quacksalber 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is a reddit alternative, just not a reddit clone.

Semantics. If you ask people to switch to an alternative social media platform, it needs to be at least as usable as the original, otherwise it will see no adoption. Lemmy will never gain critical mass if reddit continues to be the better, more usable platform for 95% of all people.

[–] h3rm17 1 points 1 year ago

Thing is, this is not a commercial alternative, nobody is asking people to come over here (and if they do it's definitely not the creators of the software). People pushing for people to join lemmy are either users who love this kind of platform, or people resented with reddit over their actions.

I agree that if I were to create commercial alternative to reddit, I should take that into account or it would probably fail. But it is not the case at all.

[–] zzzzz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Quacksalber 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That seems to be the solution, and your attitude is why Lemmy will never replace proprietary social media platforms.

[–] zzzzz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my mind, your statement is analogous to "the pickup truck will never replace the car". It is not intended to. Lemmy and Reddit are similar, but different. There are those looking for a Reddit experience and those looking for a Lemmy experience. In the end, both will have a population of users.

[–] Quacksalber 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What exacly does the "Lemmy experience" have over the "reddit experience"?

[–] zzzzz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Anyone can create and administer vs. Reddit's centralized control. Whether this is an advantage or not depends on your values. Many people have moved to Lemmy from Reddit recently because the folks that run Reddit have made some unpopular decisions and, because Reddit is centralized and closed-source, the only options are to accept the admins decrees or abandon the platform. On the other hand, if the administrators of a Lemmy instance make unpopular decisions, it is easy to move to another instance or create a new instance with different administration.

[–] Quacksalber 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Whether this is an advantage or not depends on your values.

And herein lies the problem. The absolute majority of Reddit users did not care enough to switch platforms, just as the absolute majority of Twitter users didn't care.

What those people do care about, if they ever were to consider Lemmy to move to, is that it provides a similar ease of use as Reddit does. And currently, Lemmy does not.

Besides that, I don't see how this fits the analogy about cars vs. pickup trucks you have given. Pickup trucks can be used as cars, albeit not as optimally as your average sedan. But they serve another purpose, carrying stuff around, that makes them superior to cars. With Lemmy vs. reddit, all you really choose is who gets to moderate you. There is no different experience using either platform. The only difference is that, at least for now, Lemmy is a lot more difficult to use.

[–] zzzzz 1 points 1 year ago

It seems you have it in your head that it is correct for Lemmy to "try" (whatever that means for an open source project and a decentralized federation of instances) to replace Reddit. That is not, however, what Lemmy is "trying" to do. No one is making you stay. If you like Reddit, like I said, go on back. I, for one, will be staying here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Quacksalber @zzzzz >With Lemmy vs. reddit, all you really choose is who gets to moderate you. There is no different experience using either platform.

But there is a hugely different experience. Here on the fediverse, you can talk to people whose mouths are not filled with corporate cock.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] zzzzz 2 points 1 year ago

Liftoff does this.

[–] bonobi 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just a suggestion but how about making a barrier of entry to post images? Like >5 posts with >5 up votes and 48 hours will unlock images functionality? It won't be a silver bullet but might make it annoying to create multiple accounts and participate enough.

[–] bonobi 11 points 1 year ago

And if they go through it enough to get enough accounts to upvote themselves to get past the barrier then it'd be easier to forensically find all their accounts and shut them all down. It'd make them lose a lot of time enough for a deterrent.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

To be fair, it's been more than three days since That One Meme. Maybe they are just letting it all out.