Any government or governing body should be open to criticism. They are suppose to be working for the people they serve. How is anyone going to know better if no one tells them what they are doing wrong? @[email protected] you have my support

Honestly these type of scat spamming has been really discouraging on me. I spend time and money so that the community can have a reliable and nice instance to call home, only to have a few (not sure what to call them) people try to ruin it for everyone. If these people are reading this comment, just know that every time you make these kinds of unwanted posts you are taking my time away from my family and young kids to address the reports.

My nights lately have been mostly used for coding some extra moderation tools that will moderate these in the future.

I sincerely apologize for all of you who have been exposed to literal shit images over the last week. I’m working as fast as I can and will implement something soon.

In the meanwhile i’ve added a few new admins to help with this moderation.

I want to say that I've been blown away by the amount of support that's I've received in the last 24 hours. You all have left me speechless. Thank you everyone who have donated and those who couldn't, know that being a good member of this community already more than I could ask for. Thank you!

Hi Nahvi.

Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.

Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I've since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.

One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.

That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn't be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the "be a good human" category.

I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.

Hey all,

There has been a few issues over the last couple of weeks. Here's a rundown of some of the issues we've had.

• Broken Images: A few weeks ago we had issues with broken images. This was due to me migrating our local image storage to object storage (like AWS S3). When I did the switch it broke all old images as they needed to be migrated. Pictrs at that time did not support concurrent uploads which means the migration would have taken days or weeks to complete during which time the image service would be offline. Instead I waiting for a newer version to be released that supported concurrent connections and did the migration in about 30-40 minutes one evening.

• 5xx server errors: Some of you may have experience a lemmy page with an error code on it. This was due to me trying to implement an additional proxy to shield and mitigate future risks. While rolling this out I hit a few blockers that caused downtime as we worked to rectify it. I'm glad to say that as of Today this has since been implemented.

In the addition to the above, the lemmyverse and especially this instance has been under bot attack almost daily. These bot attacks are eating resources and causing a query floods.

Lemmy is still very young and in its early phases. In time these issues will slowly go away.

P.S you don't have to worry about me leaving you guys hanging.

Hey all,

As others mentioned we did not have custom emojis so we were not affected by this particular attack. I have since upgraded our UI to 0.18.2-rc.1 which mitigates this XSS vulnerability.

Hey everyone, woke up this morning with this news. This news really comes at a surprise as I have not seen or heard of any trolling coming from members of this community. I also have not been approached by their admins to see how we could collaborate. In either case, I'll be attempting to reach out to their admins and discuss a path forward together.

I'll post an update with the details in the coming days.

Hey all,

This community is being reviewed and will likely be a discussion point to in our Agora community where we discuss about issues like this as a community.

Post that are breaking rules will be removed. If its a regular occurrence so will the TheDonald community. Please continue reporting inappropriate posts and its difficult to maintain visibility on everything that is going on at all times.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Hey,

I'm due to make a post about the instances finances soon. I'll get one posted in the next bit.

I'm still covering costs out of pocket but my goal has been to have this instance fully funded by its members. I want this instance to stay true to its members, the fediverse and be put in a position where it can continue to thrive transparently without me. The admin team has been doing an outstanding job keeping this instance safe and moderated for everyone. I don't thank them enough but they are the true heroes of this instance.

As some may know, I've been working with a local non profit for the past 6 months to have them leveraged in accepting accepting donations for this instance. They have been slow to get things done but its progressing. I may end up doing what I was trying to avoid and create my own non-profit instead if that's what it takes. That direction does have its own challenges and would add additional responsibilities to my plate.

In the meanwhile, while some of the costs of the services have gone up slightly, I get joy knowing that I can continue providing this instance to all of you. I'm OK paying the costs to keeping the lights on until we can transition to donations.

Hey all,

I just posted an update here https://sh.itjust.works/post/49787

I probably should have listened to my gut and not have went to bed last night.

Should be fixed now, it was related to an nginx setting that needed to be tuned.

Hey all, I’m always excited to upgrade to the latest versions that become available. Unless the upgrade is related to security I will tend to wait a few days to give other instances a chance to share their experiences. Before upgrading I usually go over the issues that have been submitted to help understand the risks and solutions to mitigate them.

That being said the new version does bring in a whole bunch of performance gains (mostly related to the database) that i’m looking forward to.

Lemmy.world is due to upgrade later today and I plan on upgrading shortly after them (either Monday or Tuesday).

I will put up a notification up prior to the upgrade.

Thanks

The vulnerability appeared to be from a custom emoji that they were running. SJW does not use any custom emoji so we should not be affected. In either case lemmy.world has now been restored and is back online. I’ll keep an extra eye on this instance until the patch gets released shortly.

I am no lawyer, however I do not see a problem with subscribing to NSFW communities outside of this instance. I'd go as far as saying that should you want to contribute to these external communities you can do so as long as you are not using the built in image hosting service to store your content. There are external platforms such as redgifs that could be used to store this content as long as it fit within their TOS.

Hey icy,

The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.

I'd like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that's all about and report back?

Offloaded the images to an S3 compatible host. Will take a bit but I will be migrating the older images shortly

Hey all, after finding out that they were a loli friendly community I went ahead and blocked this instance. Didn't want to wait to go for a vote on this for obvious reasons shared by many of you. Thank you for your support

Reading through the replies and I have to say ya'll don't take prisoners here. sheesh.

Anyway, I went through went through the community in question and reviewed not only the posts in the community and the comments made by the mods of the community and they weren't aligned with the kind of negativity I want to see on the instance. I have since purged the community and the mods.

Captchas have been enabled on this instance.

Hey all!

I will be posting an official announcement in the next couple of days regarding the addition of some admins to help out with the growth of user and also touch on NSFW communities. In short, while this instance does allow NSFW content we will need to (at least for the next bit) restrict pornography materials. This is due to a number of reasons which are mainly related to the legal implications. I will go more into detail regarding these reasons in the upcoming announcement.

This is the way.

Btw thanks guys