Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.

Part of the problem is the instance’s open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.

We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.

Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we’re setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!

      • @PriorProject@lemmy.world
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        4•3 years ago

        With the refrigeration, which do you consider the canonical community to follow now? You mod both, right? Are you going to keep the bit posting to both?

        • freamon
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          5•3 years ago

          Love what re-federation got auto-corrected to.

          The canonical community is the one at feddit.nl, since it has all the history and I don’t really think it’s .nl’s fault that someone used it to attack .world.

          The bot’s due to make one more post at endlesstalk (to announce that the problem is over) and then I’ll think about what to do with the community (probably delete it)

    • @jarfil@lemmy.world
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      28•3 years ago

      You can still go to the instance and read it, subscribe to it from a non-defederated instance, or even create an account there directly.

      • Draconic NEO
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        4•3 years ago

        That assumes that it’s not abandoned like rammy.site was, if you don’t know rammy.site was a general purpose Lemmy instance a while back which was abandoned by its admin and then some right-wing grifters decided to hijack it and use it to spread hatred. Similarly to this situation they also got defederated, though much more widely then in this case.

        The biggest problem is that because they were abandoned eventually the server crashed or the VPS got discontinued or something and now it’s gone. If you go to the URL now you get SSL errors and for a while it was showing up as 410 gone. So with Feddit.nl even though you can go and view the contents on it right now if it’s abandoned it will likely meet a very similar fate in the near future. Meaning that the community is on it are doomed and will either die or have to migrate elsewhere.

  • Bleeping Lobster
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    67•3 years ago

    Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it seems like everytime .world defeds from a problematic instance, it’s almost immediately smashed with DDOS attacks.

    The beauty of lemmy as I see it though IS the federation, if .world is down no worries, I’ll just browse on sopuli.xyz or any of the multitude of other instances :) we are like a sexy hydra of positivity.

    • antik@lemmy.world
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      22•3 years ago

      It’s funny that this post on feddit.nl has 20 upvotes. It doesn’t catch up once the federation starts again. I thought it would tbh

      • @Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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        1•3 years ago

        Nope, in order to not overload lemmy servers, the lemmy software does not federate pre-(re)federation content. That is one reason why I find it a bit ridiculous to wield the biggest stick you have, defederation, so freely.

        • antik@lemmy.world
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          3 years ago

          I think in the case of an instance being spammed with csa material we are allowed to use all the sticks at our disposal - and in this case it was actually the only stick we had. And once we got in touch with TedVDB we refederated.

          He’s now also in the chat room where most Lemmy instance admins hang out. I’d say that’s a positive for everyone in the end.

  • Ab_intra
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    57•3 years ago

    You guys are very transparent and that’s great. Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

  • freamon
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    3 years ago

    They’ve already replied with the reasons, but - for future reference - if you want to see specifics of things like this, a censure is often posted to https://fediseer.com. .world’s censure of .nl is here

  • @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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    3 years ago

    Thanks for all you do!

    Somewhat related: any word on re-enabling image uploads? I understand completely why you had to do it, just wondering if there’s a roadmap?

  • stevedidWHAT
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    3 years ago

    Hiya! Question, is there a way we can see this sort of information ourselves as well? Namely, reports and admin activity logs.

    What’s to stop an instance, then a collection of instances and so on from claiming others aren’t being actively moderated in order to censor?

    Not making any accusations obviously, just a thought I had while reading.

    • Antik 👾
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      81•3 years ago

      I mean, it’s easy to go over to feddit.nl and see they only have one admin who has not been active in almost two weeks.

      Full transparancy: the abuse we were dealing with from that instance was vote manipulation and worse, csam. Especially in the case of csam we can not wait for days for a reaction.

        • Antik 👾
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          30•3 years ago

          Users. That’s why it is mentioned there is no email required during sign-up. They create an account in seconds, make a post and then delete their account.

      • @SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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        10•3 years ago

        Thanks for doing this. I’ve not had to see any of it because you guys are on top of dealing with it. (Although I also don’t sort posts by new, so I probably wouldn’t see those posts before they got removed anyway.)

      • @Alchemy@lemmy.world
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        5•3 years ago

        Were they the source of the csam attack posts the other week when we removed picture uploads temporarily?

        • Antik 👾
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          18•3 years ago

          No those were from our own instance and is the reason we closed open registrations. We are working on a different solution more on that later.

    • @Tenthrow@lemmy.world
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      52•3 years ago

      The modlog for the entire instance is available in a link at the bottom and the sidebar on the main page. Everything should be there.

  • GONADS125
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    29•3 years ago

    With the nature of the recent attacks I think it makes perfect sense to take strong precautions necessary to protect the community. Can always refederate when/if the admin gets ahold of the situation.

    • Antik 👾
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      12•3 years ago

      For sure. We reached out before too but we can not sit around and wait when it’s about this stuff.

    • kratoz29
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      1•3 years ago

      Lemmy.world is still down often because DDOS attacks???

      • Antik 👾
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        1•3 years ago

        No we’re talking about spam attacks. Trolls posting nsfw images to communities

  • Haru
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    3 years ago

    Well that’s disappointing, but glad the lemmy.world team are making sure they are on top of it and keeping transparency with all that you do. Thank you.

  • @eee@lemm.ee
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    24•3 years ago

    It seems like the user who posted the csam has been banned, does that mean the admin/mod is active again?

      • @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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        34•3 years ago

        Thank you for defederating with them; I can’t unsee the horrible auto play video that showed up on my feed. Some people are really sick

        • Obinice
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          24•3 years ago

          Fun fact, it’s buried the lede not lead. Weird right! The more you know :-D

          • @assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            12•3 years ago

            Lede vs lead is always a weird dichotomy to me, because the whole purpose of lede is that it isn’t supposed to be a word, right? I did some journalism in high school and I believe we were taught that lede was purposely not a word so that you could write “lede goes here” as a placeholder, and you’d be reminded of it because spell check would flag it.

            So I’m never sure which to use, because it feels like using it in common discussion defeats the purpose haha. Either way though, you are right yeah.

            • @CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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              12•3 years ago

              They mean the same thing, more or less. Lede is just journalist slang for the story’s introduction, or lead.

              "Origin of lede

              First recorded in 1950–55; altered spelling of lead (in the journalism sense “short introductory summary”), used in the printing trades to distinguish it from the homograph lead (in the sense “thin strip of type metal for increasing the space between lines of type”)"

  • @Squander@lemmy.world
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    8•3 years ago

    I feel your frustration with “unable to get in touch with the instance administrator”. I’m waiting for a response from @ruud and @MichelleG from 9 days ago regarding abusive members.

    • Antik 👾
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      3 years ago

      This was not about “abusive members” this was about a member having too many communities according to you. We both seem to have a very different definition of “abuse”.

      The user in question does have a lot of communities but he is very active and has different moderators who he manages. Also, when the moderators of these communities do well he transfers the community over to them. As recently as yesterday when he transferred !movies@lemmy.world and !marvelstudios@lemmy.world.

      While he has a lot of communities he does a good job managing his communities and training moderators and is making our lives as admins easier. If someone has a lot of communities and doesn’t do anything with them, that is squatting and we take action. I think we have a good track record of that.

      So unless there is something we are missing I really would not call any of what the user in question did “abusive”.

      Lastly the best way to get someone to look at your problem is to use the report feature. The reason you got no reply in nine days is because there was no problem.

      • @Squander@lemmy.world
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        3 years ago

        1st, great communication- No response because there is no problem. That’s a terrific reason for instance administrators to ignore messages. I should have read their minds and known, geesh my bad. 2nd- I used the report feature on august 26th and did not receive a response until a week later. The response wasn’t even a fix, it was just asking if I was still having a problem. So thats clearly not the best way to contact admins. That leaves @ ing admins on major posts to get a response. Its annoying, but so far the only effective way. Lastly, If a user creates dozens upon dozens of new communities, solely because they might become popular and then sits on them/isnt active in them, I would say thats an abuse of the system. I suppose we should all start registering any community that could potentially become big. Then when they do become popular, we can gatekeep who is worthy enough to mod them. Plainly, power-mods shouldnt be a thing.