Right. This is a community effort, and it's important we support our instances and figure out how to best keep them safe.

Not a bad idea, but I was working on a project once that would support user uploaded images and looked into PhotoDNA, but it was an incredible pain in the ass to get access to. I'm surprised that someone hasn't realized that this should just be free and available. Kind of gross that it is put behind an application/paywall, imo. They're just hashes and a library to generate the hashes. Why shouldn't that just be open source and available through the NCMEC?

Works only if your server is hosted in the US

OK, I am going to take a minute away from the shit stirring and potentially provide some insight speaking as an admin who's had the misfortune of dealing with this so I can maybe shift this comment section into an actually meaningful discussion.

You can have your own opinion and feelings against lemmy.world but, this?

The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.

This is correct. Most lemmy admins likely agree as well, I don't speak for anyone but myself but I can say that I think it would be hard to find someone who disagreed. What happened today is a result of a catastrophic failure on lemmys end, with issues that should have been addressed over a month ago just being completely ignored. The lemmy devs shared a roadmap during their AMA & they essentially were more concerned with making shit go faster... that's about it.

They probably connect using tor. Not much you can do with that information (without effort far exceeding the value of one CP spammer).

Most people don't have static IP addresses, so banning their IP will only stop them temporarily. Then whoever gets that dynamic IP address next will be banned too. Then there's CGNAT where 1 IP address can have up to 128 people using it at once and the address changes even more frequently.

I'd assume that fucking it up is the goal. Some people are just irredeemable sociopaths who get satisfaction out of ruining other people's days.

Definitely was. It was just a flex of their power. I don't see any viable solution at the moment though, so going nuclear was the only sane option. When your options are to close a door versus playing an increasingly difficult game of cat and mouse w/ CP posters, most would opt to temporarily shutter their doors I feel.

What is worrying is that any community on lemmy on any instance is vulnerable to this type of attack. This will continue happening again and again until a clear solution, technical or otherwise, can be devised.

I gave my loyalty to Lemmy. I am not going to jump shit because some deranged lunatics decide to troll in the most abhorrent ways. I plan on donating to the project in show of support and I hope others do as well.