Okay that was much faster than I expected, I expected us to be down for at least a week.
So what happened? As mentioned in my earlier post, some absolute asswipe of a person uploaded some extremely vile stuff over on a large instance. The admins were quick to let everyone know and we all purged the info. We here were not affected because the offending community was not subscribed here, but I purged the last 24 hours worth of images to be safe.
I won’t go into all of the details right now, but previously I hosted this happily on a micro PC at home. When content is federated it means it’s duplicated onto my server and served from there, which is real bad if I’m hosting it from my home, means that essentially they could come busting down my door, which is why I reactively posted that post and took everything down while I investigated.
What’s changed is that we’re now fully hosted on the cloud, completely outside of my home. I’ve enabled pretty much every guardrail I can in the short time and have been in constant contact with other instance admins.
I won’t go into all of the details of how this is hosted, but the one clear thing is that we’re now behind Cloudflare, which has free CSAM reporting enabled, which means if anything ever crosses over it will be auto-blocked and reported on, which of course I’m happy to help feds catch assholes who post that at all.
So we’re up again for a while, we’ll take it as it goes. Lemmy will be adding in new guardrails to also stop federating images (no changes to you folks, but essentially means I wouldn’t have a copy of any image like that, it’d be on the hosting server).
Anyway, that’s all, sorry for the swears today and how angry I sound. Someone decided to post some horrible shit, some instance owners are dealing with actually seeing it with their eyes, I lost the back half of my weekend to it.
If anyone wants to help with hosting costs, it’s not very much but I’m expecting about 20/month at our current size. No one should feel obligated, but if you’d like to I set up a simple buy me a coffee, if anyone feels inclined.
-Scrubbles
Hopefully we can stay up. People are using this garbage as an attack vector on other instances, which is just the most deplorable thing I can think of to do to Lemmy. If that starts up again we’ll probably go down until Lemmy can disable federating of those images.
Hopefully though it’s done for now and those tools get added quickly. A few base protections for admins can go a long way to preventing us from getting removed