Some of you may have noticed a lot of people freaking out about CSAM and a bunch of communities closing, instances restricting registrations, turning off image uploads or shutting down completely. It's a bit of a chaos.
Fortunately your admin has been fighting this fight for the past year so I have developed some tools to help me out. I repurposed one of them to cover lemmy images
Using this approach, I've now turned on automatic scanning of new uploads.
What this means for you is that occasionally you will upload an image for a post and it will stop working after a bit. C'est la vie. Just upload something else. Changing format or slightly altering the image won't help you.
Also, sometimes you might see missing thumbnails on post from other communities. Those were the cached thumbnails hosted by us. The original images should still work in those cases.
Unfortunately this sort of AI scanning is not perfect and due to the nature of the beast, it will catch more false positives but to an acceptable degree. But I find that this is OK for a small social network site run as a hobby project.
Cool? Cool.
They know these servers are being run by amateurs who lack the capacity to deal with it at any real scale or for long term.
So they are being targeted.
That being said there have been a large vocal minority who get shit on everytime they point out that lemmy and it's top servers are 100% not prepared to protect privacy nor have the ability to respond to this shit. This was predicted but the community is absurdly against paying anybody to run a proper fucking server employing professionals and giving a fuck about how to properly deal with csam. "I'll donate rather than subscribe." Sure you will Chad, sure you will. At best you'll donate they'll $20 total which will cover maybe a month of compute and bandwidth.
This place will self destruct in a few months when volunteers are sick of looking through fucked up images for no pay or even professional mental support which is like day fucking 0 shit for anyone dealing with scam. Even fucking Reddit has a responsive team to come help out mods with this shit.
You have a common-sense point there, and so what should we (if not all Lemmy and Kbin online rafts and their denizens, most of them) do at this point?
Have at least one competent, small-enough mental health team per instance or three, whose primary job functions alike that of an active mental health hotline, albeit geared towards the Fediverse citizen in need, admins, moderators, community builders, coders, creatives, and lurkers alike, but make sure they don't overstep their bounds a bit too much, and that they also connect with others representing other instances, keeping in mind the right to privacy and all other related human rights to make sure the ecosystem stays healthy at all facets, not just in the online, but also in the "outside world" sense.
For that, diversity, genuine compassion and science-and-humanity-based objectivity are also needed for those willing to take up those roles.
I believe a non profit(s) model eg Mozilla is the answer. Charge $14/mo right out the gate, publish where the money is going each year and be 100% unapologetic in charging for services.
nobody is going to pay $14 a month. Activity would drop 95%