Scrubbles on Nostr: (instance admin here, but for a small one) woof well, for me, I agree, but I ...

(instance admin here, but for a small one) woof well, for me, I agree, but I wouldn’t use that wording.


Lemmy for sure isn’t a plug and play site. Setting it up took leaps and bounds, learning way more about nginx than I ever really cared to, and figuring out documentation that was very clearly out of date. Very little logging or error messaging exists to help with that problem.


Very little errors exist at all, it’s very much a “happy path” project. That’s why we get constant spinners everywhere, because when an HTTP error occurs there’s no actual error message. (Come on guys, just add it to your standard HTTP messages, if statusCode < 200 || >= 300 then show a toast message).


But yeah, the moderation tools have to be the worst. Lemmy has an amazing development group that’s separate from the main developers who have patched together a good set of tools, from automods to CSAM and illegal scanning, huge props to them - but these issues are routinely ignored by the main devs. I was shocked, honestly shocked that when we were under CSAM attacks that there was not an immediate roundtable of the head devs to try to solve the problem officially. Here was a problem that 99% of countries would immediately and gladly throw us, the instance admins, in jail over and they just handwaved it away. In fact, I don’t know that there was ever an official post about it, or even that there are things coming to help with it.


I love Lemmy and being here, and the devs have done a great job at building this platform for us, but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.


Bugs and caches and that sort of thing I can overlook. Those I can wait on and see them get smoothed out over time. Actual issues that could land me in jail or get the feds to beat down my door? Those I kind of expect a fast response.


So, I’ll say I’m extremely conflicted. I want to host lemmy long term, and I’m happy to bring the fediverse to a few more people, but the csam attacks really altered my view of the devs.


Edit - because my favorite manager said “Bring me solutions, not problems” a few things that would really help immediately -



<li>Integrate db0’s CSAM checker natively, more or less a plug and play option, or a checkbox. His checker sits at an endpoint. The admin page of lemmy could easily have you plop in the endpoint and it would start checking</li>
<li>Have an image management portal, with capabilities to:
<ul>
<li>Auto remove images after X time (to help with ballooning storage costs)</li>
<li>Perma-delete images and users (maybe blurred too if the CSAM checker flagged it, so I don’t need eye bleach) (Edit again, 0.19.4 might have fixed this, I need to upgrade so I’ll see)</li>
<li>Federating image purges, so one purge on one server will force purge it on everyone else’s</li>
<li>~~Disabling of caching other server’s images ~~ (Edit again, I see 0.19.4 just dropped which has this, so this is good). This way I’m only responsible for my own users.</li>
<li>View images that are not related to a post (DM’d messages that I’m hosting, or people just uploading images to my site)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Bring in a logging system into the UI itself, so I can keep tabs on the error logs. I can pipe them somewhere, but this would be a major plus as an admin</li>