Lemmy NSFW

yay 🍻

There are issues that have been on my mind for a few days, and I wanted to talk about them with you.

Downvotes

As you may notice, downvotes have been completely off for the last few days. I did this because I couldn't resist the pressure of some friends :/ I still don't know what to do about this. The majority of members probably want it to be completely open. As mods, posters and admins; some think it should be closed, some think it should be restricted (I guess).

I guess there is no solution that makes everyone happy. I realized I don't have admin skills in stressful situations, I'm a fucking stupid lol :D I miss @gabe so much.

lemmyposter212 suggested "fuzzy votes" or something that can work for us too. I think I'll just ghost this issue for a while.

Donations

As you know, all our donation accounts have been closed. Since it was my first time opening a site in the NSFW area, I had no experience. I reviewed some adult donation sites but most of them were shady. Honestly I couldn't trust them.

There are only coins now. But I guess most people don't want to deal with coins. It is because I didn't get any donations about 4 months now :D Those sent from Github Sponsor or Patreon were also returned to donators as well. I received $200-ish donations so far.

We are currently the 2nd largest instance in Lemmy. After lemmy.world, we're bigger than lemmy.ml and lemm.ee! I don't think it will work this way anymore. On an annual basis, I need to spend a month's salary for Lemmy NSFW.

Does anyone have an idea to solve this problem?

In our previous announcement, we announced that we closed downvotes.

Some people found it right, some people hated it, some people hesitated. At the end of the day, since we are on a disorganised platform like fediverse, I find the decision we took right. However, I was also annoyed by the lack of downvotes. So I searched for a solution.

I think the planned post flair support will be a good improvement in this regard. But it seems to take a long time to develop.

What do you think about limiting downvotes to only members of that community? I see it as the optimal way in the current situation.

Please vote with empathy, not just as a user, but assuming you are a poster user. Is it right decision?

Poll: https://strawpoll.com/DwyoDBooDnA

Result: done.

Quick notes;

• Clients may not work with the beta version for now. Please log out and log in back again to test it. Please request support from client devs.
• Blur NSFW and auto expand features are part of official Lemmy now, you can find these on profile settings.
• Beta version has some bugs, please report them on the repo.
• You can now block instances with this version

I can't believe that I have to post this, but AI kiddie stuff is still kiddie stuff. It may or may not be illegal where you live, but it is not OK to post on this instance and we will ban you with extreme prejudice. Thank you.

Update: if you're seeing this text, then we've completed the migration :) 🎉

TL;DR: We are downgrading the server.

Currently, the instance has a monthly cost of approximately $200, and we can barely cover this expense with donations. But more importantly, we think that the current server specs are too much for the needs.

We are the 3rd instance with the most users and one of the most stable instances with 99.55% uptime, but still more than half of the server components are not used.

Therefore, we will slowly downgrade the server to use donations more optimally. By the way, thank you to everyone who supporting us 🙏

• Old specs: 16 core, 48 ram for 160$
• New specs: 12 core, 32 ram for 125$

The migration will start in 12PM UTC, you can check from your own timezone from here: https://notime.zone/NdyvH8JtJkJmZ

Instance will be available with a few downtimes, but posts/comments after 12PM will be deleted. Please follow this post...

Hey yall! Just wanted pop on here to announce some things to keep yall in the loop.

We're here, we're alive. A lot of the team has just been pretty busy IRL so it's been more a focus on making things run smoothly rather than figuring out how to proactively improve things. Thankfully I personally am a lot less busy IRL (for now) and will be using it as an opportunity to put together staff apps and look thru inactive communities a bit more, as well as trimming down the sidebar and fixing up the docs pages.

NSFW Posts show up without needing to login now!

For those who may not have already noticed, but our lovely backend team (major thanks to @yay!) have made it a bit easier to navigate communities and posts without needing to login. Others on other instances should be able to browse local communities here now as well as to be able to access new communities better. We are working on improving the front end and although NSFW posts are blurred by default we are going to make an age gate that you need to click on.

We will be implementing alternative front end UIs

No ETA on when, but that's something people have expressed interest. The mod tools on some alternative front ends are miles ahead of lemmy's current one.

Staff apps are coming!

I am working on staff apps, but I am very averse to google forms. If there is any more privacy focused alternative (self hosted is fine if need be!) then please let me know in the comments below. I am personally more and more averse to google as I use the fediverse more.

Addressing recent spam & defederation

So, lemmy is kind of busted when it comes to cross platform posting especially from mastodon (ok, kind of is an understatement lol) but I defederated from some of the biggest sources of spam thus far.

I also have utilized a "fediblock" block list cataloguing some of the "worst of the worst" instances known within the fediverse. I tried being as selective as possible by vetting instances listed first, finding receipts, as well as using my own knowledge of some of the worst fediverse instances as well. I didn't want to copy and paste a blocklist without vetting what was going in first out of risk that something might slip thru.

We have defederated from a lot of fediverse instances (pretty much all of them arent lemmy, but it's not worth risking it with these awful places we defederated from) and man, there are some abhorrent places in the fediverse. Having things being able to be easily selfhosted is a double edged sword sometimes. Unfortunately lemmy is not like other fediverse platforms that allow hiding domains, so if you decide to peek at the /instances page to view what has been blocked do not interact or visit the instances we have defederated from as more than quite a few are known to host genuine illegal content. You have been warned.

I will be scouring more and seeing which other of the "worst of the worst" places since it feels important to be proactive about other communities that may pose a risk for some members here as our instance grows. Please know I am defederating only the instances that either present a genuine legal problem to our community if their content is federated in or could pose a potential safety risk for vulnerable community members (especially towards trans folks.. there's so many anti-lgbt instances its really quite upsetting.) Know I am doing my due diligence, finding receipts and in some very very select cases (unfortunately) visiting the sites myself to vet them myself.

With that being said, I think it's worth stating given the fact there are just so many anti-LGBT instances in the fediverse (many of which we have blocked thus far) and as more people have shuffled in recently please know that this instance aims to be a safe place for LGBT folks, and has a very strict policy against transphobia. I myself am a gay man, and take support with my trans and nonbinary siblings extremely seriously. The team is pretty much unanimous in our support for LGBT folk, and that's not something we're ever going to budge on. If there's anything that seems hateful please report it directly to an admin and we will take care of it as soon as possible.

New features are coming to lemmy (soon!)

There's quite a few new good stuff in the works for lemmy, and for those who are seeing from other instances you will be able to block domains on lemmy (hopefully soon!)

Of course that doesn't fix all the issues present, but it's a big step in a positive direction.

Anyway, it is 2am here. I'm heading to bed. I will be responding tomorrow morning and throughout the day. Feel free to comment below questions, comments, concerns, what have you. I'll try to respond as I time allows.

We are working on figuring out a solution or at some sort of heads up. No, we aren't all celebrity posts.

I haven't been able to fix these sooner as I've been busy the last few days. I got it now.

The Voyager app (voyager.lemmynsfw.com) on the instance works as expected and updates automatically now.

Post listing settings (blur nsfw/auto expand images) are back again. I will not update Lemmy version before I patch new version so it will not be unpleasant as before.

Also we're having trouble with the donation platforms. We may be making a change soon. Friends who have donated from sites such as Github Sponsors and Patreon before, what do you think about making donations from sites such as fanbox.cc or subscribestar.adult?

It's quite sad to watch unfold, but the admin of rammy has been basically MIA all month and exploding-heads users and admin (which we have been de-federated from for a while) has taken notice and has decided to invade and set up shop there to just generally push their stuff into the federation. Entire front page is a hate fest against LGBT people and just general foul bigotry. Hopefully the rammy admin comes back and cleans stuff up, and then we can hopefully re-federate (if they want to.)

Just wanted to give a heads up in case anyone was curious why another instance was added to the blocked server list :/

I was waiting for new versions, but the disk filled up faster than I expected. I'm moving 400GB image archive from local disk to object-storage. Unfortunately the process is very slow. It will take several hours.

Update: Migration finished 🎉

Hey yall, just wanted to chime in with a quick update on why we were down and have gone down a few times these past few days.

So... for those who don't know a bit on the backend way of how lemmy works right now, it's a lil more than a mess. Lemmy itself uses very little computing resources, you could probably run a decent instance on a toaster (I wouldn't suggest it though) but the problem that arises rapidly is the way photos are managed. The photo database downloads images both that are uploaded and federated. There is an option to disable caching for federated NSFW posts by unchecking enable NSFW within the instance admin panel. That's the only option related disabling federated images as of right now.

You see where I'm going with this, with this instance being as large as it is? Our photo database has been filling up pretty rapidly. We are attempting to troubleshoot solutions to prevent caching all federated content. Unfortunately as our backend team is attempting to figure that out, our pictures database just keeps ballooning more and more.

We have deleted some stuff in hopes to give more time, but we unfortunately have no choice but to migrate to object storage ASAP. Tomorrow there will likely be downtime as we migrate things over, and unfortunately there is no telling how long that will take.

Thank you for being patient and understanding while we navigate this. If you want to see updates to our status when we go down, check out our mastodon page here or come to our matrix public operations channel for updates (link in the sidebar.)

Things should work today though. Emphasis on should.

We are working on open collective still, but hosting this instance does cost money. If you are able to, donations are greatly appreciated. Especially as we will have to factor in object storage into our costs now.

Hi everyone! We are once again purging empty communities. It's happening in a day or two. Make an on-topic post in your empty comm if you want to have it not purged.

One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age.

The admin then demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet.

If someone made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends -- not roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive -- to be a child and makes porn, that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that.

One of the reasons we run our instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don't body shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after. There's no way to draw a line that says "you can't like adult people that look like X" without crossing a line that we will not cross.

EDIT: OK, closing this post to new comments. Everything that needs saying has been said. Link to my convo with the blahaj admin here.

Hi all! Mikey here, one of your fearless admins. We've had so many new users lately that I wanted to bid you all welcome! Have a look around. You'll need an account to see the nsfw content, which is most of it. Feel free to sign up for one -- we rarely go more than a few hours, maybe a day at most, without zeroing the application queue.

We like new people and we strongly encourage to you participate, not just lurk! But before you do, please check the rules in the right-hand sidebar of the main page (or here) and also give the ol' FAQ a quick clickeroonie: https://docs.lemmynsfw.com/docs/faq/.

Our purpose is to be a safe, friendly place for NSFW "research" on the Fediverse . I know a lot of you are coming over from reddit and so I would like to stress that despite superficial similarities, we are not reddit and we don't want to be reddit. The vibe around here is different and some things that were common over there are not acceptable around here. Please make note of our content restrictions. We are especially picky about respect and consent, and we take our sourcing policy seriously.

Things are still pretty new around here and there are a lot of rough edges, so we hope you'll try to bear with us. Lemmy isn't fully featured yet, so running a Lemmy instance, let alone an NSFW instance, is kind of like trying to build a plane while it's already in the air.

If you have any new user questions you can comment here, post in c/asklemmynsfw, or if you use matrix, there's a public operations page: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org (what Lemmy is to Reddit and Mastodon is to Twitter, matrix is to Slack or Discord). You can also message me or another admin, but matrix will probably get you a faster reply.

Thanks everyone! Welcome once again, and I hope to see you around.

Hey yall and happy Friday! (Or Saturday... depending on where you are).

I was just wanting to pop on here with a condensed list of some announcements of things we are working out, goings on within the community and the lemmyverse, and just generally have a place for any questions, bug reports, or chat within the instance. Unsure what the frequency of these announcements will be, but if I need to make more I will.

How often do you want to see these kinds of threads? Also, I will be responding to this thread all weekend.

Anyway, below is a list of announcements and shiz. Lets get into it!

Addressing Bots

Unfortunately, we had really not much of a choice but to enable application only registration currently. There was a large influx of spam bots, which does suck but we are approving them as fast as we can. It's likely this will stay, but we will reassess this as Lemmy improves. Currently the question is "why do you want to join this instance" which is a little vague, but unsure what else to change it. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

With that being said, our backend team is working on adding a NSFW yes/no dialogue and allowing NSFW without having to sign up or login. No ETA on when that will happen, but it's a heavy consideration and was discussed prior to this decision.

Federation Woes

It goes without saying, Lemmy is a little more than barebones right now. Your patience really is appreciated. Our backend team is figuring shit out now to really dive into how to address our needs as an instance and troubleshoot with other instances stuff regarding federation and the current limitations of Lemmy right now. I and some other admins are actively in contact with some other large instances. Coordinating actively with other instance admins has helped quite a bit in making things run generally smoothly.

Right now, we really need to make sure that we are tagging NSFW. People have mostly been good about it, but if you see anything untagged as NSFW please report it. There is question how well edited NSFW tags are being federated, so if you accidentally post something without an NSFW tag consider removing it and reposting it with a NSFW tag instead just out of courtesy for potential federation concerns.

We suspect some apps aren't blurring NSFW posts properly either for those on other instances.

Image Uploading

It should be noted that it is preferable that those posting images into our community are doing so with a lemmynsfw account. It makes managing content easier and has the potential to save headache with other instances. There are quite a few instances who do federate with us but do not feel comfortable hosting NSFW images on their servers, and I ask you to please be mindful of that. That's not to say you have to be on lemmynsfw to participate here though! You can comment, upvote, etc etc. Just consider if you are posting images either using off site hosting or posting from our instance.

This is not a steadfast rule currently, but that may change in the future and concerns as to when we are actively considering that will be made clear in advance.

Open Collective

Right now, we are still finding a potential fiscal host for open collective. We’ll update you all once we have more to share.

Content Creators & Trolling

Per this thread we have established our respect of content creators on our instance. Do not report content creators/onlyfans models as spam unless they are in a community that explicitly prohibits it or are truly posting spam. Also, don't harass content creators. Seriously, be nice.

It goes without saying here though, if you see a comment or post harassing anyone please report it. If a moderator of a community is failing to address it, contact an admin directly. Right now, there is no way to directly report to site staff specifically, it goes into the mod queue and site staff see the entire mod queue.

With that being said, if you are a moderator and are seeing harassing posts as well or feel they are breaking site wide rules, you can delete the reported post and simply not file it as resolved so admins can see it. It is preferable you do this and then/or message an admin.

Community Stuff & (Potentially) Proposed Changes

As of right now, there is quite a lot of communities that exist within a few varying categories with some overlapping. Some are empty inactive communities, communities without active mods that have any report sent to admins directly, and communities with mods that are active but are still having a large volume of reports, and generally redundant empty communities.

We are discussing the potential of making communities by site staff approval preferably so that if a comm already exists people can be directed to it. We are curious about this as a potential, any thoughts?

We will be purging empty comms, as well as allowing some to be "adopted", and discuss with mods of communities that are having a large report queue or just simply a large number of subscribers that they should get more mods on their team.

If you are a community moderator, please ask to join our matrix mod coord chat.

New Staff, maybe?

We are still figuring out the potential of adding more members to our team. We do need more content admins, potentially in varying time zones. We are cautious due to the limits of Lemmy of adding new admins though. There are some people in consideration, so if you've discussed such with myself don't worry you'll be contacted in time about it even if you miss staff applications if there are any. If we do proceed with staff applications, an announcement will be made.

Also, having potentially someone who is bit more familiar with rust might be helpful for our backend team as well.

Updated Rules Are Live

We updated our rules a few days or so ago after posting them and taking into account feedback. The sidebar serves as a condensed version of the rules, whereas docs.lemmynsfw.com will serve as a means of elaborating for those who want to know more in-depth details behind the "why and how" or are community moderators/site staff and want to know more about the basis of what our rule enforcement expectations actually are for the instance.

Our docs page is under construction, so what you see beyond the FAQ is still being built. We will update when new pages are live though. As a reminder, these pages aren't rule changes but rather serve as an in-depth look beyond the condensed rules on the sidebar.

Hi all! Apparently there are a couple of Lemmy apps now where the "report" button is right next to the "share" button, and so we've been getting inundated with a bunch of reports that aren't actually real. One of those apps defaults to putting no text in the box where you're supposed to put in the reason for reporting, and the other one defaults to "Spam or Abuse".

We don't have the resources to go chasing down all bajillionty-twelve of those reports we're getting on the off chance that one or two may be real, so for the time being any report with either nothing or "Spam or Abuse" in the subject line will be swept into the circular file, unless we can tell just by looking at the post and not clicking anything (no nsfw tag, obvious off-topic spam) that it's a bad post.

Thanks!

The docs site is still under construction, so expect it to change and more pages to be added and it to improve progressively.

Thank you for your patience yall. It seems our mitigation efforts worked and we were likely never in danger. If you are concerned about other accounts on affected instances, it is unlikely your personal data was breached. Keep a look out for more info on those instances though as they will likely explain things more.

We have little information currently, but we may at least lock the site down for preemptive safety reasons. There seems to be a serious XSS vulnerability within lemmys code. We have disabled community creation temporarily and are contemplating taking the site down temporarily as well. Please find us below and stay safe, ya'll.

https://mastodon.world/@lemmynsfw https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org

EDIT: For the time being we have disabled federation, new user sign ups, and community creation.

We quietly defederated temporarily earlier because lemmy.world seemed to be compromised earlier in some way, but then it was fixed. Now it's happened again. Unsure what is going on over there but there isn't much use speculating. They have been dealing with weird redirects to shock sites like lemonparty (throwback). Whoever has compromised them seems to have some early 2010s internet sense of humor I guess.

Anyway, once they have things under control and an announcement is made we will refederate ASAP. For the time being, please avoid going to their homepage for the time being as we have no idea what the nature of the compromise of their site is and to what extent.

EDIT: seems lemmy.blahaj.zone just was as well. :(

Please stop reporting all OF models as spam. If a post is off-topic, report is as off-topic. If community rules forbid OF models from posting, report that. If a user is flooding a sub with multiple posts a day in a row, that's a legit report as well.

Otherwise a post by an OF model is not in and of itself spam, even if it is made by a female with the temerity to control her own sexuality.

Hi all! As promised, here is the proposed text of the newest version of the rules. The staff has gone through like eight drafts and literally thousands and thousands of matrix posts to get here, so please be kind. You can see @limeey's comment on the transparency post if you want more insight into how this sausage was made.

We are opening these rules to commentary from the community before they go into effect. To be clear, this isn't a vote, but we will take all community feedback into account and answer whatever questions we can before finalizing anything.

Please keep in mind that we are not Reddit, we do not have Reddit's resources, and safety and consent are our priorities.

I'll post the draft in two parts in two comments: The new sidebar, and the FAQ/clarifications page.

An ex-admin to whom we have given access to the server, has reported us to the server provider. Also we were already planning to migrate somewhere else. So right now we're moving to a more secure server.

I'll try to make a smooth transition. Any interaction (post, comment, like etc.) after 11AM (CET) will be deleted, but the site will not be down during migration. It will be an estimated 1 hour process.

Update: its done. Hopefully without problems. If you see this, you are on the new server.