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?

  • TheDude@sh.itjust.worksM
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dadd Volante@sh.itjust.works
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      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@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

    • tasbir49@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Do you have a link to these tools that you’re coding? I’d be happy to help you out myself.

      EDIT:

      Until federation is better at coordinating deletions to other Lemmy instances and Kbin (check this thread on kbin, the comments are only removed because I reported them to the instance admin), the API redacts removed comment content instead of just returning a flag that says removed, and the trolling with NSFW imagery and usernames with slurs is reduced, I’m gonna refrain from posting on Lemmy.

    • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
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      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@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

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

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

    • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

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

  • Melpomene@kbin.social
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    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@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

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

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • ZekeSulastin@sh.itjust.works
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        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@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              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@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                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@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  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@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

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

                • zzzzz@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

  • bonobi@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

  • duethe@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It’s absolutely disgusting. I think I read on another instance someone found out who it is. I’ll leave the spoiler tag for those that don’t want to know the details. It was super surprising though.

    spoiler