Seems like a good plan. I have been very impressed with your approach to administer ing lemm.ee.

Regarding the planned invite system, what would be the consequences of inviting a malicious user? I would think it would be hard to enforce any consequences simply because of the open nature of lemmy as an ecosystem.

It is now impossible to add an avatar or banner to profiles because the only way to do so through the UI is uploading to the instance. There’s no way to add an external URL. Just wanted to point that out in case it wasn’t intentional. Very understandable if that’s something we have to sacrifice for the time being.

Edit: I noticed that images will upload to the account's home instance instead of the community's home instance. This means that one workaround for the time being to change your lemm.ee community's icon and banner is to create an account on another instance and then add that account as a moderator to your lemm.ee community. You can then use that external account to change the icon and banner of your lemm.ee community because images will be uploaded to whatever instance your account is on instead of lemm.ee.

That sucks, but hopefully something good can come out of it eventually. Like better mod tools...

I understand that admins need to take whatever measures needed to protect themselves from legal pursuits

At the same time I hate to see the promised federated network revert to what commercial platforms have become, karma and account age requirement, phone and identity verification , forced 2fa and what not.

Maybe lemmy should implement a shared database whereas if an admin of an instance marks a post as potentially illegal, it gets replicated to other instances automatically and gets in queu for deletion.

Hey there! Why not talk with the main lemmy developer to try and integrate such a content blocker directly into the lemmy stack so that it’s easier to implement for smaller instances? Thanks for keeping this instance up and runnin’! Cheers!

Great plan!

I've searched what CSAM means, and I'm flabbergasted! Doesn't the authorities catch these criminals?!

A karma system is sounding pretty good right now... /me lifts shield and ducks

Even if it's just a a limited tiered system with numbers to obsess about. Level - 1 browsing rights. Graduate to level 2 after 5 days and total of greater than 30minutes of logged in activity

Level - 2 commenting rights. Limited to 10 comments daily for 5 days.

Graduate after at least 3 comments, total upvote count >+3, and 5days.

Level 3 - posting rights. Limited to 3 posts daily for 5 days. Unlimited commenting.

Graduate after 5d and total upvote count >50

Level 4 — image posting rights. 10 images per day max

Graduate after 2 weeks and total upvote count >100

Level 5 - you've made it, everyone is equal here. Entry level users are still enjoying and growing into the community. No need to be a tool about trying to get more karma / points and number of bots / temp accounts / total losers should be minimal by this screening level.

These are great ideas especially the ability for users to invite others. I think it’s also a good way to get new people into the fediverse since inviting someone will have them easily know what instance to go to.

Will you submit all these features to the official lemmy backend too?

Thank you for the update. I appreciate your efforts in moderating and keeping us informed.

Top work - I notice DBZero's instance reckons they've implemented AI scanning-and-blocking for CSAM, it may be worth getting in touch/investigating there.

I think the only sustainable option here is to keep media on the instance it was first posted to and every instance managing their own stuff.

If it gets too crowded close registrations and another instance grows.

I didn’t even know there was an option to load images directly from the source instance instead of caching the content locally. I know it’s a resource issue and it can slow things down a bit for users, but I think ultimately it should be done that way by default, to mitigate exponential propagation of illegal content. Wasn’t caching the main reason why lemmy.world preemptively blocked piracy communities?

That, or admins should be able to selectively choose what communities to cache content from, like maybe the ones where they can confirm there is active moderation.

A way to deal with false positives of an ML NSFW scanner would be: Once per day, each user can "overwrite" the scanner. If a user is caught abusing this, they get banned.

I wonder how hard it would be to fund a full time staff to review content. That's how other platforms do it.

2. All images which have federated in from other instances will be deleted from our servers, without any exception

At this point, we have millions of such images, and I am planning to just indiscriminately purge all of them. Posts from other instances will not be broken after the deletion, the deleted images will simply be loaded directly from other instances.

My impression was that this was how this worked from the beginning, but apparently that's wrong. I thought the host instance (that is, the instance of the user making the post, not necessarily the instance of the community) would be the host of the image. Instead, it seems like instances share images and whatnot between themselves, to distribute the load to their own users.

Maybe this core principle is flawed. It should definitely be reviewed, anyway.

I think the images should never be cached from other instances in the first place, that is a huge oversight in pictrs since not only does it have the potential to cache unwanted content but also causes the images hosted to rapidly accumulate which isn't ideal as it increases storage requirements which is unfair to people who want to self-host a personal instance. Hosting a personal instance should not have monstrous storage requirements or serious liability risk due to caching all images automatically, it should only cache what is uploaded to the Instance like profiles and banners, and posts that include images from the Instance.

I have reservations about allowing fully-invite based registrations on lemmy instances. While I do think it might be good to have invites as a way for users to skip filling out an application I don't really like the idea of requiring them like Tildes does, makes it feel like an elitist exclusive club of sorts having to beg for an invite from users. I don't think it should be an alternative to application-based registration, but rather a supplement to it, if someone can get an invite from users that's great but if not they should still be able to write an application to join, this could be extensive and also lower priority since you could get invites but should still be an option available.

Account requirements really depends on what they are and what they restrict (also who on the instance is allowed to impose restrictions). For example on instances with downvotes enabled I think score/upvote requirements are a bad idea since it essentially means that people who disagree are locked out, like on Reddit with karma restrictions, I do not support this, it creates an echo-chamber where unpopular opinions. It'll also lead to upvote farming if there are negatives due to having a lower score.

Comment or post requirements would just lead to post or comment farming similar to vote farming, though it's not as bad as score-requirements since people making posts and comments naturally (whether they are liked or not) can't be taken away by other people based on opinions (only if they break the rules and get posts removed, which isn't even remotely similar since they broke the rules).

Limiting image uploading is a fair requirement in my opinion since uploads can be particularly harmful if the uploads are malicious, and also uploads aren't really needed since people can externally host almost all their images without the need for uploads.

When it comes to DMs and restrictions around them I feel like that should be up to individual users to decide to allow private communication from certain users or not, or even to allow DMs at all, this shouldn't be something globally applied to people, maybe it could be a default in User settings and have a requirement set by the Admins but people should be able to turn it off if they don't care or want to accept messages from new users, I know I certainly will, I hate being nannied when it comes to who's allowed to send me messages, IMO Annoying or uncomfortable DMs are a fact of life and I prefer to deal with issues when they happen rather than block anyone who's a new user that might want to talk to me, it's one of the things I hated that Reddit does without giving me the option to opt out and receive messages from everyone.

I think having a Machine-Learning based system to identify Malicious images is actually a pretty good idea going forward, I know how some people feel about AI and Machine-Learning but I think it's probably our best defense considering that none of us want to see it, it might have False positives but I'd rather than than to allow CSAM to live here. Ultimately the choice is have ML scanning or Disable pictrs here, I think ML is the better option because people are going to want to have Avatars and without pictrs that isn't possible (unless Lemmy adds support to the UI for externally hosted Avatars and Banners).