Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won't help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @Striker@lemmy.world the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn't his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what's next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It's been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn't the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

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685 comments

Anyone got any idea why they are doing this? Seems a bit extreme.
- This is a very popular Lemmy.World community. This instance has been dealing with regular ddos attacks for quite a while now. Either some person or some group has an issue with this specific instance, or they picked it because it's the biggest and they're trying to take Lemmy down generally. The ddos attacks have chased away a number of people, but lots of us have dug in our heels. This is probably the newest strategy.
  The admins have said, based on the ddos strategies, whoever is doing it is familiar with underlying Lemmy implementation, so my guess is it's someone from one of the instances that we defederated from, but it's just a guess.
- Potential sabotage. There’s definitely a corporate interest in killing the Fediverse and getting people like you and me back to Reddit and Twitter.
  Plus for outside groups with potential interest who aren’t informed of the situation, Lemmy is now branded as that CSAM site so people are not as likely to come here and or leave their established mainstream social platforms
  
  This is sabotage on another level. The people posting this faces seriously time in jail for just having it on their PC.
  
  Oh I agree
  
  I think it's been the same people throughout, starting with the defacing, followed by the DDOS'es, and now this. Judging from the content of the defacing, it's bigots who don't like the idea of someplace they're not welcome.
  
  Ah so exploding head fucktards.
  The ones that care so much about “grooming” and “leave kids alone”
  Who would have thought that was all projection!? Wait we all did
  
  I was thinking like 4chan types, but your theory tracks too.
  
  I suspect there's a lot of overlap there
  
  Fair.
  
  The problem with asking "who's behind this untraceable attack?" is that you either truthful but useless answers (we don't know), or just someone speculating that their "enemy" is responsible. I wouldn't use the word projection so easily in this context, if I were you.
  ( unless you consider interpol and the likes)
  
  seriously, you’re defending…them? Also I have the right to make assumptions based on previous attacks thesee all occurred right after defederation…so yes, hate groups like them are suspect #1
  “If I were you”
  Annnnd what is that supposed to imply?
  
  I'm not defending anyone.
  I didn't expect I had to spell it out for you, but here's what I'm saying: Until some kind of international investigation force comes out with clear evidence, anyone who tells you "who did it", is just projecting who they want to be the perpetrator.
  
  My cynical mind believes this.
  
  Is kbin having these issues?
- Fuckin weirdos man.
- Could be any number of reasons.
  My money is on 4chan/8chan/whatever today's derivative is. I used to be super active with them back in the day when I was young, racist, and stupid.
  This sort of stuff matches their target profile:
  Visible - Reddit has shone a spotlight on Lemmy recently, and Lemmy.world specifically has gotten called out as the most promising of all the Lemmy instances
  Vulnerable - the tooling to stop large-scale attacks doesn't exist. Users aren't "locked in" to the threadiverse yet. People generally aren't expecting it.
  "Lulzy" - attacking a large Lemmy community would cause a lot of panic in the wider threadiverse community. The 4chan/8chan trolls thrive on panic; they think people freaking out is funny. The more panic they cause, the funnier it is.
  The methods line up, too. I wouldn't be surprised if they were behind the DDOS as well. DDOS is the simplest tool they use, and when that stops being funny they escalate.
  CSAM, gore, scat, torture are all stuff they have in their arsenal, ready to spam. They go out and look for the stuff, build up folders of it to use on their victims. That stuff causes panic, and that's what they thrive on. They want to see the biggest response they can. Scat is just gross, usually a good opener. CSAM is good because it gets operators in legal trouble. Gore and torture makes people leave a site in droves.
  Channers aren't dumb, either. They know how to use technology. If something is open source, that just gives them something to study and look for attack surfaces. Someone will make a custom-built tool to exploit a vulnerability and it will run until the vulnerability is patched. I had dozens of random tools back in the day that were intended for one-off attacks, plus stuff in the toolbelt like Low Orbit Ion Cannon (DDOS) and Cain and Abel (password cracking).
  I should reiterate that it has been many years since I was part of that crowd - well over a decade at this point. Things are undoubtedly different. (I refuse to call these guys "Anonymous" - that name was butchered a long time ago when people started speaking on places like Twitter "on behalf of Anonymous". I'm not using the names they call themselves either.)
  When I was a channer, one of the big targets was Reddit. Channers hated Reddit, because Reddit would steal stuff from 4chan and repost it. Reddit was just an inferior version of 4chan, but they were so smug about things and they were a bunch of prudes to boot. So Reddit was a relatively popular target until finally they got better at stopping large attacks.
  I have to imagine that a lot of channers dislike Reddit still. Lemmy is seen as the new Reddit - and worse, it's run by commies.
  Channers that do this stuff are Nazis. They just are. (Why do you think they chose the number 8 when 4chan got sick of them? It's not because it's 4 times 2.) They're extremely open about being Nazis, with jokes about gas chambers and everything. You get the hardcore tankies as well, but the tankies are generally so far gone as to be essentially indistinguishable from Nazis themselves.
  The fact that Lemmy is left-leaning makes it another reasonable target. Nazis hate commies, although they will accept tankies (to an extent). This is probably why Lemmy.ml wasn't targeted despite being the historic "main" Lemmy instance (full of tankies). Lemmy.world is left-leaning but still highly visible, so it'd be a good target. If Lemm.ee keeps growing, that's probably the next target on the list.
  This is all baseless speculation. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are both also reasonable sources. Hexbear is notorious for being disruptive in the same way 4chan was back in the day, but supposedly they're better nowadays (not that I necessarily believe that).
  But I'm reminded of the stuff I did as a dumb kid, before I knew better. It matches with how they act. I'm not saying it's explicitly 4chan/8chan/888chan/whatever, but the way it's coordinated certainly smells familiar.

685 comments