Hello Reddthat,

It has been a while since I posted a general update, so here we go!

Slight content warning regarding this post. If you don’t want to read depressing things, skip to # On a lighter note.

The week of issues

If you are not aware, the last week(s) or so has been a tough one for me & all other Lemmy admins. With recent attacks of users posting CSAM, a lot of us admins have been feeling a wealth of pressure.
Starting to be familiar with the local laws surrounding our instances as well as being completely underwhelmed with the Lemmy admin tools. All of these issues are a first for Lemmy and the tools do not exist in a way that enable us to respond fast enough or in a way in which content moderation can be effective.
If it happens on another instance it still affects everyone, as it effects every fediverse instance that you federate against.

As this made “Lemmy” news it resulted in Reddthat users asking valid questions on our !community@reddthat.com. I responded with the plan I have if we end up getting targeted for CSAM. At this point in time a user chose violence upon waking up and started to antagonise me for having a plan. This user is a known Lemmy Administrator of another instance. They instigated a GDPR request for their information. While I have no issue with their GDPR instigation, I have an issue with them being antagonising, abusive, and

Alternatively, stop attracting attention you fuckhead; a spineless admin saying “I’m Batman” is exactly how you get people to mess with you

Unfortunately they chose to create multiple accounts to abuse us further. This is not conduct that is conducive for conversation nor is it conduct fitting of a Lemmy admin either. As a result we have now de-federated from the instance under the control of that admin.

To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.
This will hopefully help them understand what is and isn’t acceptable conduct while they are on Reddthat.

On a lighter note

Stability

Server stability has been fixed by our hosting provider and a benefit is that we’ve been migrated to newer infrastructure. What this does for our vCPU is yet to be determined but we have benefited and have confirmed our status monitoring service (over here) is working perfectly and is detecting and alerting me.

Funding

Donations on a monthly basis are now completely covering our monthly costs! I can’t thank you enough for these as it really does help keep the lights on.

In August we had 4 new donators, all recurring as well! Thank you so much!

Merch / Site Redesign

I would like to offer merchandise for those who want a hoody, mouse pad, stickers, etc.
Unfortunately I am a backend person, not a graphics designer. Thus if anyone would like to make some designs please let me know in the comments below. 🧡 An example:
Mobile Phone cover with the Reddthat Logo

I am thinking we need at least 3+ design choices:

  • The Logo itself (Sticker/Phone/Magnet)
  • Logo with Reddthat text
  • Logo with Where You've Truly 'ReddThat'!
  • Something cool that you would want on a hoody. <- Very important!

I’ve managed to find some on-demand printing services which will allow you to purchase directly through them and have it shipped directly from a local-ish printing facilities.

The goal is to reduce the time it takes you to get your merch, reduce the costs of shipping and hopefully ensure I know as little as possible about you as I can. If all goes to plan, I won’t know about your addresses / payments / etc and everyone can have some cool merch!

New Admins

To help combat the spamming issue, the increase of reports and the new approval system I am looking for some new administrators to join the team.
While I do not expect you to do everything I do, an hour or two a day in your respective timezone, which amounts to randomly opening reddthat a couple times a day. Checking in to confirm everything is still hunky-dory is probably the minimum. If you would like to apply to being an Admin to help us all out, please PM me with your approval answering the following questions:

Reason for your application:
Timezone:
Time you could allocate a day (estimate):
What you think you could bring to the team:

I am thinking we’ll need about 6 admins to have full coverage around the globe and ensure that everyone will not be burnt out after a week! So even if you see a new admin pop up in the sidebar don’t worry, there is always room for more!

Parting words

Thank you for those who have reached out and gave help. Thank you to the other Lemmy admins who helped me, and thank you everyone on Reddthat for still being here and enjoying our time together.

Cheers,
Tiff

tldr

  • We have now defederated from our first instance :(
  • Signups now are via Application process
  • We had 4 new people join our recurring donations last month! 💛
  • Merch is in the works. If you have some design skills please submit your designs in the comments!
  • Admin recruitment drive
  • PeanutbuttergritsEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    I would like to personally thank you for all your hard work. I really wish that I had the skills to help out, to spread the load, so to speak. I really appreciate what you’ve done for the ship. Keep up the good work and remember to take a breather every now then. Thanks again.

  • LettoEnglish
    10·
    8 months ago

    Thanks for continuing to work hard!

  • limerodEnglish
    7·
    8 months ago

    Which lemmy instance was deferated? I see 4 instances in the blocklist. 3 appear to be subdomains of lemmy.ml and the last one is a porn lemmy instance.

    • NiaEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      deleted by creator

  • CogsworthAEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    Thank you for keeping this place awesome! It’s greatly appreciated

  • Burger@burggit.moeEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    You appear to be already using Cloudflare so it might be doing a “good” enough job to combat spambots and other adversaries.

    Since I don’t much like cloudflare, my instance uses Crowdsec which uses a crowd sourced block list aggregated from other servers to block out nasty IPs that have a bad reputation for attempting to run automated exploits, spam, overzealous crawlers, and other assorted nasty stuff on said servers that the list is crowdsourced from. A lot of Tor exit nodes, to no surprise, are on that list too.

    Idk this is something that might pique your interest if you want to further harden your setup.

  • SeraEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    Thank you for the work you put into running this instance

  • souperkEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    Hi Tiff,

    Thanks for the update, I am so sorry to hear that you have to deal with all that shit. I stand with you, no tolerance for CSAM.

    I have seen more than a few posts/comments mention the lack of moderation tooling for Lemmy so I had a look. It seems Lemmy (and the fediverse) is severely lacking right now.

    The mastodon docs recommend blocking IPs and email servers, for such a mature project I would expect better options. There are a couple issues of LemmyNet GitHub, but they are old (may 2022), and I was disheartened to see the level of moderation tooling right now. No hate towards the devs, they have been swamped the past few months, I hope they don’t burnout having to face one crisis after the other…

    I saw Mozilla is starting an effort to create better moderation tooling for mastodon, I wonder if they could help out… Some of them are probably listening right now.

    Also, if it would help I could spin up a database + API, for instances to share their banned users, IPs, hashes of media files, and links. If someone could use it to create a bot to automatically delete users/posts/comments, it could help consolidate admin and mod efforts across the lemmyverse.

    • TiffOPMAEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Yeah, even mastodon suffers from undersirable tooling. Even when it could be classed as a mature project.

      Thankyou for the offer but the activity pub spec does allow for some information sharing. For example, users have a flag if they are banned on their home server that is shared. So that if the home server bans them, it also propagates.
      But a… feature of Lemmy is that if a post on a community gets deleted it only happens on that local community.
      So if a post is deleted on the home community it isn’t deleted on any other instance that has subscribers. This is by design and works great when used for non-nefarious means. As a bad post on a community filters out for all other admins/mods to deal with.

      We will get there :)

  • autumnEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    Thanks as always for taking the time to keep us up to date on what’s going on with the server!

    I am glad you are recruiting for more admins. Regardless of whether lemmy improves their moderation tools, it’s hard to substitute for an actual human being looking at stuff.

    • TiffOPMAEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Thankyou! We will get there. Others are developing the moderation side of things, but it went from “soon” to “omg quick!” Quite fast!

  • TiffOPMAEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    For Graphic Designers:

    Highest Res Book (yep its tiny):
    Reddthat Logo

    Text Ideas I’ve been using:
    Reddthat with the Logo replacing the h

    • StThicketEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      In order to make graphics for prints, a vecror based file is needed. Do you have a svg, ai or eps file format? If not, the book needs to be recreated in the proper format.

      • TiffOPMAEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        I sadly do not. I found the book on the web made it a color I liked and reduced size for our main icon. Shouldn’t be hard to make it into a vector though. For me it would probably take 8 hours. For a good graphic designer, probably 5 minutes.

        • StThicketEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          I could try to recreate the logo, but it’s easier to just take a ready made svg graphic and turn it into a similar-ish logo. I thought this made the logo stand out a bit more. I took this public domain icon and changed the color to match the reddthat color. Here’s the result.

          Siggestion 1

          Suggestion 2

          I chose the font to resemble a standard book typeface.

          I’ll be more than happy to share the svg-files if you would be interested

  • AggroKrabEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    Thank you for your hard work! It is appreciated: )

  • imidentEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    The application processes can be “gamed”. They could create an account and sit on it or even wait 30days and then flood it with csam. There is no way for me to tell if a user has good or bad intentions unless I make people write a paragraph of text, even then it can easily be gamed.

    Even lemmyworld has had other troll account issues. Ban a person, they signup again with another random email account and start spamming again. The features for anti-spam are not built into Lemmy like they are with Reddit. It’s only been 90days since I bought reddthat.com and less than 60 since we had a huge influx.

    What the other server admins have done will not change the fact that out of the 1000 servers with open signups, federation of posts is still an issue and actually won’t “save” them from having to deal with it. Sure it won’t be because of a user on their instance, it will just be a user from another instance posting content to their instance.

    (from https://reddthat.com/comment/2314735)

    someone says mean things on the internet

    To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.

    • TiffOPMAEnglish
      5·
      8 months ago

      I know! It could almost be deduced that I am a hypocrite.

      The tools I have at my disposal are limited to combatting spam, or combating aggressive signups. At the end of the day they did not say a mean thing, they said a lot of mean things and then created 3 extra accounts to abuse further.

      The downsides I list in my previous posts are not going to magically go away. There are still going to be here. But I think that having required reading where it states what constitutes acceptable interactions and a little about reddthat will in the end, be a benefit to us.

      When you are an instance admin you do not have leeway to mouth off, resort to violence or abuse the system. This person did all three. Of course they can easily sidestep and signup elsewhere and interact with us, but we will come to that later.
      We are held to a higher stance. An admin is the embodiment of the instance. If I resort to violence then it allows everyone of our instance to do so.

      For example I really want to have fun & make jokes/puns/comedy. Like:

      joke about your account

      create an account and … wait 30days

      Account is 2 months old with 1 comment 😜.
      I’m glad I got you to come out of your shell!!

      But some could call this bad taste, not find it funny or in jest, or you could take it as a personal attack when it was never meant to be one! Situational comedy is not for everyone.
      I cannot do this at all because situationally it will result in reports which means more work for me or a host of users migrating and reddthat dying. Or everyone taking it a step further insulting everyone and calling it jokes. There is a time and place for everything. Terrible jokes/non jokes from instance admins are best not allowed.

      It’s been a hard week, maybe the instance admins are all on edge, maybe I acted too harsh, maybe there was a better way to do it. What I didn’t include is that after chatting with others on the Lemmy matrix with other admins they too have had unwelcomed interactions with this person. These all fed into how I decided to handle it.

      We shall find out if it was the best course of action but the only thing we can all do is move forward, enjoy our time here and relish in people we might call friend.

      • imidentEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        I’m glad I got you to come out of your shell!!

        Neah ill just go back to lurking

    • NiaEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      deleted by creator

    • TiffOPMAEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Yep it is right. As others have deduced the lemmy.ml domains are test instances for the Lemmy devs.

      And that list is also right. (Except delayed) We did temporarily block lemmygrad on that date as a test. As you can see it has a last seen column as well.

      • mateomauiEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        Just wondering why certain subdomains were blocked and not lemmy.ml as a whole? Currently no opinion on it either way, just wondering.

        edit: Nvm, re-read the reply from Nia, got it now.

    • TiffOPMAEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      This certainly is tin foil hat like. haha.

      Reddit I would say has barely felt any issues regarding Lemmy. The fediverse (specifically Lemmy) has at least 450k accounts/users. Reddit has 50 million daily active users.

      We would need 10x more users to even being in the realm of close. Considering the current state most of the instances are in… I hope we don’t get there any time soon!