Hello World,

today, @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has provided an update to the media upload scanner we're using. This should reduce the amount of false positives blocked from being uploaded. We have deployed the updated version now.

While we do not have stats about false positives from before we implemented the scan when uploading, those changes did not change the overall data availability for us. Flagged images were still deleted, they were just still served by our cache in many cases. By moving this to the upload process, it has become much more effective, as previously images could persist in Cloudflare's cache for extended periods of time, while now they won't get cached in the first place.

Over the last week, we've seen a rate of roughly 6.7% uploads rejected out of around 3,000 total uploads. We'll be able to compare numbers in a week to confirm that this has indeed improved the false positive rate.

Hello World,

following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.

Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we're primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don't consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.

Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.

We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don't review each individual report or moderator action unless they're specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.

We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn't allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins' criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.

We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.

As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.

Hello World,

we've just updated our tooling that scans uploaded images for illegal content.

We don't expect this to cause any issues. If you do experience any issues with uploads or media in general please let us know.

This will hopefully improve the current situation where sometimes previews, thumbnails or entire images have gone missing after they were posted.

Uploads will now be scanned at the time they are created, which should result in immediate feedback when uploads are rejected.

Due to maintenance at our hosting provider Hetzner, there might be an outage of lemmy.world between 03:30 and 04:30 UTC on November 25th. (What's that in my timezone?)

Status can be found at https://status.lemmy.world

We're aware of ongoing federation issues for activities being sent to us by lemmy.ml.

We're currently working on the issue, but we don't have an ETA right now.

Cloudflare is reporting 520 - Origin Error when lemmy.ml is trying to send us activities, but the requests don't seem to properly arrive on our proxy server. This is working fine for federation with all other instances so far, but we have seen a few more requests not related to activity sending that seem to occasionally report the same error.

~~Right now we're about 1.25 days behind lemmy.ml.~~

You can still manually resolve posts in lemmy.ml communities or comments by lemmy.ml users in our communities to make them show up here without waiting for federation, but this obviously is not something that will replace regular federation.

We'll update this post when there is any new information available.

Update 2024-11-19 17:19 UTC:

~~Federation is resumed and we're down to less than 5 hours lag, the remainder should be caught up soon.~~

The root cause is still not identified unfortunately.

Update 2024-11-23 00:24 UTC:

We've explored several different approaches to identify and/or mitigate the issue, which included replacing our primary load balancer with a new VM, updating HAproxy from the latest version packaged in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to the latest upstream version, finding and removing a configuration option that may have prevented logging of certain errors, but we still haven't really made any progress other than ruling out various potential issues.

We're currently waiting for lemmy.ml admins to be available to reset federation failures at a time when we can start capturing some traffic to get more insights on the traffic that is hitting our load balancer, as the problem seems to be either between Cloudflare and our load balancer, or within the load balancer itself. Due to real life time constraints, we weren't able to find a suitable time this evening, we expect to be able to continue with this tomorrow during the day.

As of this update we're about 2.37 days behind lemmy.ml.

We are still not aware of similar issues on other instances.

Update 2024-11-25 12:29 UTC:

We have identified the underlying issue, where a backport for a bugfix resulting in crashes in certain circumstances was accidentally reverted when another backport was applied. We have applied this patch again and we're receiving activities from lemmy.ml again. It may take an hour or so to catch up, but this time we should reliably be getting there again. We're currently 4.77 days behind.

We still don't have an explanation why the logs were missing in HAproxy after going through Cloudflare, but this shouldn't cause any further federation issues.

Update 2024-11-25 14:31 UTC:

Federation has fully caught up again.

Hello World,

we know one of the most important indicators of comment and post community interest is votes. Beyond that, reports help to regulate comments and posts that go beyond down-votes and into the rule-breaking territory.

Unfortunately, Lemmy's current reporting system has some shortcomings. Here are a few key technical points that everyone should be aware of:

• Reports are NOT always visible to remote moderators. (See Full reports federation · Issue #4744 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub)
• Resolving reports on a remote instance does not federate if the content isn't removed.
• Removal only resolves reports in some cases, e.g. individual content removal. Some people remove individual content before banning the user, especially when the ban is with content removal, as individual content removals resolve reports on all instances. Bans with the remove content checkbox selected will not currently resolve reports automatically.

Our moderators are also volunteers with other demands on their time: work gets busy, people take vacations, and life outside of Lemmy goes on. But that doesn't mean content that causes distress to users should stick around any longer than reasonable. Harmful content impacts both Lemmy.world users AND users of all other instances as well. We always strive to be good neighbors.

While the devs work on the technical issues, we can work to improve the human side of things. To help keep the reports queue manageable and help reports be resolved in a REASONABLE amount of time we will be enabling global notifications for all stale reports. Open reports older than 1 day will trigger a notification for 1 week every 2 days so as not to overwhelm community moderators endlessly. If a community moderator does not wish to receive these reports, they may simply block the bot, but we still expect them to address unresolved reports.

We expect that this feature will eventually be removed once Lemmy has a better reporting system in place.

As an aside, we recommend that all LW communities have at least two moderators so there is some redundancy in resolving reports themselves, and to reduce the workload on individual moderators. We know this can be harder for smaller communities, but this is just a recommendation.

We recommend that moderators have alt accounts on Lemmy.world to resolve reports that are from federated instances.

As always feedback is welcome. This is an active project which we really hope will benefit the community. Please feel free to reply to this thread with comments, improvements, and concerns.

Thanks!

FHF / LemmyWorld Admin team 💖

Additional mods

We recommend using the Photon front-end for adding mods to your community.

With the standard lemmy-ui, additional mods can only be appointed if the account has made a post or comment in the community.

Photon (https://p.lemmy.world) does not have this limitation. You can use the community sidebar, click Gear (settings) icon, then click the Team tab, and add any user as a mod.

Finally a new blog post about all our instances and the finances..

Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links

• https://lemmy.world/post/18829828
• https://lemmy.world/post/18817262

Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.

Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.

Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

EDIT: Added org operations contact info

Hey all,

In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.

We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we've done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.

ToS Additions

That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.

Regarding misinformation, we've tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:

• Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
• We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
• When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
• Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
  • Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
  • Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.

We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.

By-laws Addition

We've also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.

This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we've created as a result of what has happened over the last week.

Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation

https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/

Sincerely,

FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

EDIT:

We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.

EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):

We've posted a response, sorry for the delay.

👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈

Hello Lemmy.World users,

yesterday we had an incident where human error lead to accidental removal of 2FA for all Lemmy.World users.
Until the mistake had been corrected and the original state had been restored where possible, 2FA was not enforced for any logins, even if the user enabled 2FA prior to this.

Timeline (all times in UTC):

Approximately at 2024-08-09 09:30 MFA had been removed for all users due to a mistake when MFA was intended to be reset for an individual user.
Around 2024-08-09 22:10 we became aware of the issue due to a user reporting that they were no longer prompted for 2FA on login. We immediately started an investigation to determine the root cause for this and discovered the mistake that was done earlier. Once the root cause was identified we started working on restoring the original state.
At 2024-08-10 01:10:00 2FA had been reactivated for all users that previously had 2FA enabled and hadn't reactivated it on their own since. After additional investigation to identify affected users with 2FA that had logged in during this period, we have sent out individual messages with information about logins to their accounts during this period.

Although less than 2% of our active users have 2FA enabled, we are committed to keep our user accounts as secure as reasonably possible, and we will review our processes for resetting 2FA for individual users going forward to reduce the risk of this happening again in the future.
Fortunately our robust backup database backups allowed us to revert the exact state we had just before this change happened, allowing us to restore the original 2FA secrets for all affected users.
During this period, we have observed a total of 824 logins. 18 of these logins were done by 14 users who had 2FA disabled. Notifications to all affected users who we observed logins for during this period have been sent shortly after publishing this post.
2 users had reactivated their 2FA already on their own, so we have not reverted their 2FA to the previous state.

If you have any concerns that your account may have been compromised during this period due to the lack of 2FA enforcement feel free to reach out to us via email to info@lemmy.world or via PM to @lwadmin@lemmy.world.

Hey everyone,

We wanted to address a common situation we've seen over the years with some large online forums, reaching out to moderators for questions and concerns.

Typically a good first line of contact is to use the Report button for any posts that need moderator attention. This will open a report for both the community moderators and the site admins. This is normally enough for most larger communities with active mod staff. You may also reach out to your community mods, they're here to help. 💖

We do encourage our communities to take care of their own and want them to always feel empowered to run themselves as they see fit (provided they are following the global site rules). Issues can arise for some smaller communities with only one moderator or situations where the local mod staff is inactive for one reason or another for an extended time.

In these situations, we've seen folks email our ticket system, and while we will try and get back to them, this ticket system tends to get end-user support cases mixed in (as well as a low stream of spammers trying to buy ads 🙄).

What we do want, is to provide a more direct line of contact to the site-admin team, so when ANYONE needs to reach out to us when something is amiss, they can get a timely response. While the team all are on a few different platforms, this tends to create a fragmented approach of not just the WHO, but the HOW to contact us.

While we as a team use our internal chat platform, we want to find a happy middle ground between @'ing us each directly in random chats, and issues sitting for too long in our ticket system.

This new system would be for PRIVATE Messages as a supplement to our Lemmy.world Support community, which we do monitor very closely, and our ticket email info@lemmy.world, both for more technical issues. Think of it like the bat signal 🦇🎆!

To this end, we've created two methods for reaching the site-mod team directly.

• A Lemmy Bot User that will relay DMs: https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
• A dedicated email account: report@lemmy.world
  • We've also provided a Keyoxide profile https://keyoxide.org/hkp/report@lemmy.world for PGP / authenticity

We hope that between both an anonymous platform approach AND a secure email-based approach, we can keep everyone happy 💝

In closing, please, always try and reach out to your community mods FIRST, they usually will know best how to handle a difficult or tricky situation, and use this only when you feel you need to reach out now.

• The FHF/Lemmy.World Admin team 💓

Hey all, We are planning to do a Docker upgrade tomorrow 6/30 Sunday, around 1800 UTC. The whole site will be down during the upgrade, but should only be down for a short while. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up. Thanks!

• @jelloeater85@lemmy.world

Hey everyone,

The Fedihosting Foundation is looking for a new site-admin for Lemmy.World, to help our busy team. This moderator will help with reviewing and acting on reports, weighing in on user content, and helping foster our local communities while acting as a friendly neighbor to other fediverse instances.

You also DO NOT need to have an account on one of our FHF services but WILL have to create an account after joining. Users from other sites WELCOME!

Benefits:

• You'll get to work with a great team of passionate kind, goofy individuals from all over the (lemmy) world!
• We have weekly virtual hangouts where we brainstorm new ideas and catch up with each other. Community for us is not just a buzzword.
• We can also provide work and personal references, as we are a registered legal non-profit.
• While not a technical role, you will also gain exposure to best-in-class industry tooling and processes for large-scale hosted applications (aka modern DevOps).
• We also run a small blog, that we'd love to have folks contribute to.
• Join in on the editorial voice for our featured communities.
• We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work come first
  • If you're having a hard time finding time or are busy, we will always do our best to help and support you.

Applicants should have the following qualities:

• Experience moderating a diverse group of individuals from many geographic, religious, and LGBTQ+ backgrounds.
• Able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week.
• Excellent interpersonal skills and communication.
• Solid background in conflict resolution.
• Must be able to speak English.
• Works well asynchronously with remote teams.
• Grammar skills optional 😛

Bonus skills (which you will learn if you don't already)

• SQL / Business Intelligence software skills.
• N8N workflow automation
• Web Design (Hugo + GitHub Pages).
• Python scripting

Application process:

• It goes without saying that we will only be considering applicants with a significant positive history of online posts and/or comments, no trolls, please.
• Applicants must be okay with sitting for a video interview and must pass a basic background check.
• While not strictly required, a CV with relevant work and volunteer history will help during the application process.
• We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2), so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

Please apply HERE https://forms.gle/epTdTy9Xh9kNFKsQA

(Edit: Updated post, thanks Donuts!)

(Edit2: Thanks for all the feed back on this post, it's much appreciated 💗💗💗)

(Edit3: If you feel like you'd fit in, apply, the req's that we posted are more of a suggestion, then a hard yes or no)

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/3740832

turns out I did my math wrong, so it’s a little less than 30 days

July 12th, 2024 @ midnight EDT

https://canvas.fediverse.events

✨ this year’s event also supports the entire fediverse not just Lemmy!

(you have to be able to make/receive text posts, like mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) (peertube accounts will not work)

you can get update announcements on other fedi platforms with @canvas@fediverse.events link

chat about Canvas on Matrix or Discord (they’re bridged)

What’s the Problem?

Over the past few weeks we have been receiving large amounts of activity requests from kbin instances, primarily kbin.social. The issue is intermittent and the root cause is unknown. It appears as though some process occasionally gets stuck in a loop on the kbin side. For example, a legitimate user may upvote a post in one of our communities, causing kbin to send an upvote action, then an undo action, then an upvote action again, an undo action again, and on and on.

This is not straining lemmy.world’s infrastructure at the moment. However, it does create enough network traffic to be problematic for the Lemmy network in general because these activity requests get passed on to other instances. Some instances have already struggled to keep up with normal traffic from lemmy.world due to how Lemmy processes activity requests (see https://reddthat.com/post/15383278, for more info). When this kbin issue occurs it multiples our outbound traffic and makes the problem worse. The additional activity requests can easily triple the number of outgoing activities from lemmy.world to other instances.

Short-Term Fixes

As a temporary fix we are currently blocking all incoming activity requests from kbin.social.
Users on that site are effectively "read-only" in lemmy.world communities at the moment.

We are hoping to replace the current block with a rate limit on incoming kbin activities. Unfortunately, it may take a few days before the lemmy.world infrastructure team has time to implement that.

We were initially banning the individual users whose actions were being repeated, with the intention of unbanning them when the repeated requests stopped. However, the problem has persisted, and that game of whack-a-mole is manual and too time-consuming. It also gives the impression that those users had done something wrong, which is not the case.

Long-Term Solution

We have reached out to Ernest, who is the kbin dev and kbin.social admin. So far we have not received a response. Ultimately, this appears to be a bug on the kbin side. Hopefully he will be able to dig into this issue soon and resolve it. Until then, we will try to mitigate it on our end as best we can.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for bearing with us.

For some recent history regarding this issue please see these comments:
https://lemmy.world/comment/9081380
https://lemmy.world/comment/8961882
https://lemmy.world/comment/9330566

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

Removal of piracy communities

Hello world!

Some of you will already have noticed that we have removed some piracy related communities from Lemmy.World during the last day.

Lack of communication

First off, we want to address the lack of communication.

Not everyone in our current admin team has been with us long enough to be aware of the previous issues and discussions related to these communities and the impact this has on our community.

We should absolutely have published this announcement when or before we removed the communities, not hours later. After realizing this mistake, we would have liked to write this a lot earlier already, but we were all busy with irl things, that we just didn’t have time for it.

Lemmy.World is run by volunteers on their personal time, nobody here gets paid for what we do.

Removed communities

Next, we want to explain how we got to the decision to remove these communities.

[!crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com)

A lot of the recent content posted to this community included images instructing users to visit a specific website to obtain a copy of the release that the post is about. These instructions were in the form of Type in Google: visit-this.domain. The domain referenced in these posts is entirely focused on video game piracy and providing people with access to copyright infringing material.

While there may be legal differences between whether one is linking to specific content on a domain or just linking to the domain itself, such as linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy compared to linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/, we do not consider this to be clear enough in laws and previous lawsuits that linking to just the domain is acceptable, if that domain is primarily about distributing copyright infringing material. We therefore do not allow linking to such domains. Additionally, we do not see a significant difference between posting a link directly to a website and embedding said link in an image, so we treat them equally.

[!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com)

This community is, for the most part, just about discussing various topics related to piracy. We do not at all mind discussion about this topic, and if it had been limited to that, this community would be fine.

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is willing to accept this content on their instance, as well as the potential legal risk coming from this, which they’re free to do.

We do not plan to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com, is a great person, and we have no problems with him as a person. This is just a matter of different risk tolerance.

[!piracy@lemmy.ml](/c/piracy@lemmy.ml)

Same as [!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Why have the piracy communities been restored previously? What changed?

Currently, based on the memories of team members involved in the decision back then, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the community moderators and Lemmy.World admins in how the community will be moderated going forward, as well as which types of content are allowed.

Lemmy.World expected/assumed that links to websites primarily focused on facilitating distribution of pirated content would be disallowed in these communities.

The community moderators however do tolerate references to such websites, as long as people are not linking to individual content directly.

We suspect that this may have been missed during our original review when restoring the communities, which lead us to previously restoring these communities.

Why now?

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

Terms of Service clarification

Last, as we’ve reviewed our Terms of Service, we have updated our wording here to make it more clear what is and what isn’t allowed when it comes to piracy. This was already covered by "Do not post illegal content of any type. Do not engage in any activity that may […] facilitate or provide access to illegal transactions" in section 4, but we have now added section 4.1 to better explain this.

We apologize for the delays in communication.

Currently we have an images issue. Our Wasabi (S3) account was disabled because of some illegal content that was found, we're working with them to get the account re-enabled and the content removed.

[Update 20240308 14:47 UTC] The issue has been fixed.

There's some unrest because the Open Collective Foundation is stopping.

Don't worry, we use Open Collective Europe as a donations platform, they're going nowhere.

We've added some donation platforms, so if you would like to support us running our .world servers, you can do so here:

• Ko-Fi‬ (Preferred because of low fees)
• Liberapay
• PayPal
• Patreon
• OpenCollective
• Bunq

And for those wanting to donate crypto:

• Monero address: 83tnuFN4f28jRxTBW9qGDad2U23qNE5nfeW4Pfyd85oWMW7J9gqpXi3S8FDbX5uEeCAKcGnSpS2XT5dGwYiELthg8XuDrxH
• Cardano address: addr1v9qv6xvfwcx9ny56uag4umu6238sw2e7ff2kcxl3qe7p9esayjxgu

Thank you!

[Edit] Some of the links were broken, they should now all work! [Edit 20240314: Added Liberapay]

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)

Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal <3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@LemmyWorld@mastodon.world) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN & Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.

See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711

While we value our users' right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

Dear Lemmy.world Community,

Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I'm reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I'm sure you can probably guess what we've had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I'll add the thing we're talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don't know.

Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.

The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn't apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.

This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it's relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.

We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.

Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

The Lemmy.world Administration

Legal / ToS

Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I'm sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

Check the new blog post about the past 3 months for our .worlds