Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.
We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.
We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.
We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.
Take care, LW Team
Glad to hear. Obviously this is less than ideal, but working towards solutions is what’s important.
No place is safe from this, unfortunately. I moderated 2 big brazilian subreddits, and then decided to volunteer to help a smaller one. I had a day (and to be honest, an entire week) absolutely ruined when somebody did indeed set a bot to post large amounts of CSAM to the subreddit. Luckily I was online to quickly purge it all, and Reddit’s admins did remove the accounts pretty much instantly, but I feel for every Lemmy admin that even caught a glimpse of this material and now have to purge their computers and honestly, their minds, from that. Sorry to hear it happened.
CSAM
I just looked up this acronym and am sorry I did.
Same but not sorry. I always called it CP but I guess this is more of a straight forward name.
Yeah, the term CP (Child Porn) has always been a terrible name for it. It sounds weird, but “Child Porn” sounds much less dramatic than it is, like some sort of fringe porn. Meanwhile CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) make it a lot more clear that there is a child being abused.
Same, and to make sure no one else has to have it in their search history, CSAM stands for “Child Sexual Abuse Material.”
I saw one of these videos in my feed last night and it was very obvious to me what it was. Thankfully it wasn’t anything that was to bad, but It still gives me the creep that something like that was in my feed.
Bummer, but I hope you can find a solution soon! What a PITA for you all.
Sounds like a plan! It’s a 100% beneficial thing, it should clean it up a bit.
I vote for tribunals.
Sounds like something a bot would say! Off with his head!
Wasn’t the argument for having open sign-ups that some Lemmy apps redirect straight to Lemmy.world for registration?
Yes but when people start creating accounts to post CSAM it doesn’t leave us much choice.
Will this make it easier to reopen federation with instances that were concerned about abuse of our open sign up policy? (or was the issue with beehaw resolved while I wasn’t looking?)
If it’s temporary, likely not. The concern from most of the instances is that open subs mean literally anyone and anything can join, including bots which create account after account, just moving on when the original is banned. “We are closing open signups for now” is non committal, I’m betting the only way things get refederated is if World commits to this change for the long term.
There are too many posts on this site linking back to reddit.
You guys need to program reddit URL in your site code to have it blocked from being posted, make it scramble url or block it.
Good. If this is what it takes to overcome the issue then it’s fine. Sucks for the real users but they also have alternatives.
Registrations are not closed. Normal users will still be able to join.
Wait I noticed that there’s an image button in the application form, is there any risk that that might be abused by users passing by to upload to pictrs in registrations without an account? That could be a big problem if they could.
Tested it in an incognito tab. It seems to be disabled. Clicking the button does nothing for me.
That’s good then, was worried for a sec that people could upload images without having an account, that would be very bad and make these kind of attacks insanely easy.
Does this mean Beehaw will refederate?
It’s a good question. Hopefully the Beehaw admin team will reach out to the Lemmy.World admin team to have a discussion about exactly what the LW admins are trying to achieve and under what conditions they will be ready to reopen submissions. Though even if they do have that conversation there’s no guarantee that that will match up with what the Beehaw admins are looking for in order to refederate. It was made clear from the Beehaw admins at the time though that they didn’t have any issues with LW in general, only that toxic disruptive people were using the open sign-up of LW to create accounts to go cause trouble over at Beehaw (outside of the general LW userbase) and that they hoped to refederate once better tools were in place to address those disruptive users. Could be that lines up pretty well with LW’s goal to wait until they have better tools to address malicious bot accounts before they reopen signups.
Considering this is a temporary measure, I imagine not. Lemmy.world has been under constant attacks as the #1 Lemmy instance and it’s not going to stop just because bots can’t get in automatically anymore.
Considering the people that run Beehaw and their very fast defederation, I can’t imagine that their statement of wanting to refederate is anything other than a mere pleasantry. I doubt they really want to.
And its fine, small communities are easier to manage. Its not like we are really missing out on much.
IMO registration applications should have been in use right from the start. Less annoyances for admins and moderators.
No, applications are a very degrading process for both users and admins.
I agree it’s annoying and hopefully will one day soon not be necessary, but “degrading” is something I don’t think ever occurred to me. Is there some aspect to having to get manually approved that is degrading that I’m not aware of?
I never use services which require an application. First of all, that’s a bad user experience. Second, it’s enough to write some bullshit during job applications.
The application is a question asking if you read the statement (which is the same as the post above).
The rest of the application is the same application you had to fill out when you created the account even when it was open sign ups. The only real difference is it’s not automatically accepted but manually accepted.
degrading?
Absolutely agreed. Similar to waiting periods for weapons purchases. It would be an effective filter for most people who get in the mood of making a troll post, they would get tired of it before they are approved, and many users with hateful names would be disallowed before they can start posting their hate.
Example of hateful user
@[email protected] being the quintessential example that pushed Beehaw to defederate from LW, after that user posted anti-lgbt and misogynist stuff directly into Beehaw’s lgbtq+ community :::
Not really, you have to manually approve all.
Indeed. This is a lot more work.
Oh shut up
I wouldn’t put the manual review of thousands of application into the “less annoyances” box.
I think it’s the right call honestly. We’ve grown so quick that it must be hard to manage by now.
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https://github.com/bumble-tech/private-detector
Do you guys think this could help?
Hope it restricts the attack surface, why do people have to be such knobs
Not wanting to be too conspiratorial, but it isn’t necessarily people simply doing this out of the badness of their hearts. The fediverse is a disruptive platform and there are many parties with deep pockets that might happily funnel a little bit of cash to certain consultancies in certain countries to stop things and add friction to this platform before it really takes off. Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!
Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!
The software developers who created Lemmy openly criticize systems of government and economics. These are nation-state battlegrounds too. The barrier to entrance is very low, as Lemmy doesn’t even do routine tracking of account creation, rate-limiting alone isn’t really defensive. 15 years ago sites like Reddit had major vote manipulation detection logic behind the scenes. This is pretty much unleashed playground for a lot of known tactics.
This is a very silly conspiracy theory. Big corps don’t give a shit about Lemmy, but there are plenty of script kiddies who want to hack easy targets. Contrary to your belief, there are plenty of dumb idiots with plenty of badness in their hearts.
Big corps are more sociopathic than you realise. There are so many underhanded games going on at that level it will make your head spin.
Big businesses indirectly and sometimes directly fund APT groups. They will buy things that give them anonymous access to competitor trade secrets, or fund attack campaigns against competitors. This sounds like the kind of attack campaign a competitor might launch as part of a one-two combo. This is the first part, the second part is to get editorials out there regarding how lemmy.world is full of CSAM.
No way would a company risk being caught being responsible for CP. That would cause a massive backlash in the US socially, and the legal troubles would be huge. And the stock market would also very painfully punish them.
Do you really think there aren’t ways for a company to avoid having their names put against such operations? A simple anonymous darknet transaction is enough to get this done without anyone’s name being put on it or CSAM touching corporate machines.
Risk outweighs the rewards. Especially for something as small as lemmy. Take off the tin foil hat. It doesn’t work like that. Have companies done evil things, yes, but in this case, absolutely no way.
Risk outweighs the rewards.
What risk? Keep it off the books, take standard dark web precautions when purchasing such a service and there’s no chance it’ll be traced back to you.
Especially for something as small as lemmy.
Small but growing, and steadily establishing itself. That’s a momentum certain companies will want to kill.
Take off the tin foil hat. It doesn’t work like that.
ahahahahaha.
My sweet summer child, I’ve seen it first-hand work EXACTLY like this. I work in the field of offensive security. On the one hand it first amazed me how much big legitimate companies play in that space but then I realised - of fucking course they do. It only takes a bit of know how to sweep most things under the rug.
Nah. The risk greatly outweighs the reward. Even if this hits the news, I doubt it’d affect numbers on here that much, especially since it’s not that big. It’s not even big enough to cause issues for “competitors” (and I use the term lightly). The fediverse is simply not really ready to compete with established actors. So the “benefit” is quite small. The risk if they’re caught includes executives getting jail time and likely irreversible harm to their brand.
Nah. The risk greatly outweighs the reward.
Does it? Standard dark web precautions are more than enough to throw any investigation into a dead end, especially for a one-off transaction with the buyer having little to no other activity.
The fediverse is simply not really ready to compete with established actors.
Yet. The Fediverse isn’t ready to compete yet. Business people aren’t looking purely at the present, they’ve got a keen eye on the foreseeable future too. If there is a growing momentum towards the fediverse, that can spell trouble for Reddit in 5 years time. The entire point of such an attack is to derail momentum on the platforms. By the time they are ready to compete, it’s much too late for this kind of attack to have any reasonable effect.
The more intelligent solution is what Meta is doing with Threads. Not something like this. There’d be a lot more money blackmailing the company than to mess with CSAM.
Big corps are a lot sneakier than something so blunt.
There’d be a lot more money blackmailing the company than to mess with CSAM.
There isn’t a company to blackmail. You can’t treat the Fediverse as a competing company because it isn’t one. You have to treat it more like a movement, like Occupy Wall Street
How do you derail a movement? You make sure the participants are slandered to the point that your accusations are the main things people on the outside remember of it. Mainstream Media did this with Occupy successfully.
However this doesn’t work if your opponent is too big, too established or too well funded. Microsoft tried to do this with the Open Source Movement, but the latter was too well established and funded for it to work.
Big corps are a lot sneakier than something so blunt.
That’s the thing, they’re not being blunt at all. Literally anybody can pay for this kind of attack to happen and not even the service provider needs to know who the buyer is.
The only thing that is needed now are media hitpieces about how federated services spread CSAM and you’ve got damage that could make the YouTube adpocalypse look small.
No one cares about Lemmy. Grow up.
Which is why you’re signed in on lemmy.world? Because no one cares about Lemmy?
Obviously their comment was hyperbole, and the literal interpretation is based on the context of the conversation. Do a bit of critical thinking.
This is the internet, Steeve. We don’t do critical thinking here.
I’m not an evil corporation. Do you even read the thread?
Lemmy is nowhere near big enough to cause any of the competitors any consternation.
Edit: to be more clear, the fediverse as a whole isn’t big enough. It’s like believing XMPP is going to cause Apple to worry about iMessage.
The alt right instance has been fucking with world since they were defederated…
This is something right up their alley, so the simplest solution is they’re doing it.
I like conspiracy theories as much as the next person. But let’s be real for a moment … this is shitty people doing shitty things. In part because Lemmy is a vulnerable and maybe relatively easy target by being indie software with indie instance management and relatively young. They might have a general purpose, such as being alt-right and defederated. But at it’s core, I think it’s gotta be just the “pleasure” they get out of breaking someone else’s shit … these people exist, we know they exist.
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Eh. It’s a new platform with new instances and a lot of potential attack vectors. With new users it’s becoming a valid target for them.
Adam Jensen? Deus Ex - Federation
With the American election next year and all the chaos on sXitter, no unlikely.
No, Lemmy is nowhere near big enough for that. If it was, it would be simply bought out by one of those companies, and then shut it down, like with XMPP. They have no rhyme or reason to skulk around in the shadows.
In its current state, it is still very much in its infancy. A company would see more threat in the competing social networks trying to copy their model, or people just leaving outright than Lemmy for the time being. Mastodon would be more of a threat by comparison.
Come on people, Lemmy’s user base is what, a few hundred thousand? A million tops? Which “parties with deep pockets” is this disrupting? The Lemmy userbase is a rounding error on the number of users of other popular social medias.
“Don’t want to be too conspiratorial, but let me continue to drop a ridiculous conspiracy with no evidence”
And big corp wants to smother it before it’s bigger. It perfectly makes sense. It’s so much more difficult to kill a service/movement when it’s already widely adopted and popular. Identifying small, new players in the field and disrupting those takes very few resources for them, a rounding error, if you will.
The fediverse has the potential to be a threat to some big corps out there, and Lemmy is just one speck in a sea of a lot of specks. Together those specks are growing the fediverse, and the only way to disrupt it is to get rid of those specks.
You’re delusional if you think the Fediverse, a totally open protocol that “competitors” can (and plan to) join instead of having to “defeat”, poses a threat big enough to corporations with hundreds of millions or even billions of users to warrant the spamming of child porn.
Not from a big corporation, no. It’s probably 4chan types. They tend to get deeply offended when people don’t want nazis around.
IIRC there was a post a few weeks ago that had the total number of active accounts somewhere around 60,000. Yeah, we’re definitely not big enough to attract that kind of directed attack
That sounds exactly like the badness in people’s hearts though.
The corporate types behind such actions aren’t people.
Dehumanization is how we got here.
Not a great way back? Unless you’re looking to go in circles.
Oh stop. That’s like that discussion about not dehumanizing neonazis.
And the answer here is the same: the corporate types don’t see us common folks as human. They see us as a product at best, and disposable resources at worst. It took a lot of effort to get to the point in which the rights of workers, the rights of consumers and the rights of people in other roles, to be recognized. Real sacrifice, even.
So we gotta do what it takes to keep those rights, because, again, those corporate types don’t see us as people. So, fuck them. They aren’t people either.
Humans are humans, whether you like them or not.
The bad thing about Nazis is they disagree. Feel free to be more like Nazis? I’d prefer to be different. Still human, but you know, acknowledging my fellow humans as such.
To ignore this fact is to lay claim to the idea that you could never end up in a situation where you’re treating people as subhumans. To call any human as subhuman is obviously antithetical to making that claim.
Clearly the only response to people who want to treat you as subhuman is to treat them with love and kindness so they can take advantage of the situation.
This is how every “civility” rule on the internet eventually becomes a “don’t sass the nazis” rule.
Such a Rick thing to say.
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