There has been a considerable increase in bot activity and malicious content posting on Lemmy recently.
Fortunately our little instance has been mostly spared so far, but I do worry that this may change at any moment.
In an effort to protect Lemdit and ensure its long term survival, we now require registration applications to be submitted by new users wanting to join us.
I've kept it short and authentic people will always be welcomed here, it just means that joining is not instantaneous anymore. I personally dislike registration applications, but I feel like protecting what we already have is more important than convenience and there aren't any better measures available yet.
Hopefully this will change as Lemmy evolves, I know the devs are working hard to find better solutions.
exploding-heads.com have recently announced their intention to move to Nostr. Their plan is to leave Lemmy behind entirely, with exploding-heads.com poised to go offline on August 31st 2023.
I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.
Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr:
it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers
it makes censorship very difficult
it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly.
As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are
petty tyrants, or
benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment)
I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative.
Some users are questioning the transition to a micro-blogging-style platform like Nostr and the effect this will have on existing Lemmy communities.
About exploding-heads.com
exploding-heads.com is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with ~7.4k registered users.
They are a right-leaning instance which is centered around free speech:
Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable
We are a fun loving community of free people tired of propaganda fed to us government, media, big tech, crony capitalists, and self anointed elites.
exploding-heads.com has received a largely hostile reception from other large Lemmy instances, many of which have chosen to defederate from them.
A couple of days ago a new user joined Lemdit, started a new community called “Controversial ideas” and began posting content.
I originally took it at face value and was interested to see what came next. The first couple of posts appeared to check out. They were somewhat controversial but nothing rule breaking.
This one argued that we are sexual just like any other animal and "Sexualization" is bullshit:
This other one described how infantilizing young adults and treating them like children to ever higher ages is creating bad outcomes:
This third one argued it's a myth that brains develop until we're 25, they're actually mostly baked by the time we reach 14.
Wait a moment, I think I spot a pattern here...
The controversy grows
Over the next couple of days, posting intensified:
There was certainly decent engagement, many people against, some people for, votes in every direction, so I was naturally intrigued. It turns out, the angles were different but the destination was always the same.
Here's a summary of each (other) post:
Enforcing taboos - Heartwarming video about a young mother whose life was ruined because she had a drunken romp with a 14 year old at a party.
Child Beauty Contests - They don't hurt anyone, it's just kids playing dress-up.
What's the real goal of neurology - Scientists are just using it as an excuse to treat teens as inferior by suggesting they are children - apparently comparable to nazi scientsis.
Puritan Revival - "some totally normal things like 5 or 10 year age gaps between partners is extremely disturbing to Gen Z." (actual quote)
Very Strong Kool-Aid - There are enough people on the planet, there is no fertility crisis. This is the outlier. I've noticed he will weave in an unrelated post every now and then to make the whole charade more believable - more on this later.
Widespread Delusion - We have thousands of 22 and 24 year old cops, nurses, etc, but people claim the brain only stops developing at 25, which is absurd.
Revolutions are scary - Gives some examples of past "revolutions" like the printing press or the Internet, then makes the connection: "The parallels are clear. Today peeps scream about wanting to lynch anyone who dares to date anyone younger than them. They need no evidence. Just like nobody needed evidence to know a witch needed to be executed. In times of great change people look for a scapegoat. Then it was alleged witches. Now it’s alleged pedophiles."
How we got teen pregnancy all wrong and made it much worse - A long wall of text that is trying to justify that it all went wrong when we criminalized relationships between adults and minors. "
Uncovering the agenda
By this point it was obvious that there is an agenda at play. None of this is random, which probably means none of this is unique to us either.
I didn't have to dig far to uncover a very prolific and frankly dedicated campaign spanning several instances, all following a similar modus operandi:
Female username (probably because people are quicker to judge a male they suspect of being a pedophile)
Seemingly legitimate "controversial" communities that encourage healthy debate
Posts that challenge various aspects of why it's illegal for adults to have sex with young teens (14-18).
Occasionally an unrelated post or two to keep up the charade.
Upvotes his own posts and arguments using his alt accounts.
He uses 4 main angles for the communities he creates:
Controversial Ideas - "These things are just taboos created by puritans"
Sexualisation - "It's not a thing, the puritans again"
Common Sense - "Think about it, them laws and science don't make sense"
Fighting Bigotry - "It's bigotry to not treat 14-18 year olds as adults, in every way ;)"
Here's a list of the communities I found, there are probably more:
By this point you've probably figured out that Lemmy is not where it begins, nor where it ends. This individual has an entire portfolio of accounts to support his diddler's crusade.
His YouTube channel is prolific, but thankfully not very successful. He spends considerable effort making shitty animation videos to prove the same kind of points:
One of his Twitter accounts was banned, but not before someone captured these gems:
Shock and outrage at the accusations
Naturally, I could be one of the puritans. In fact, I must be. Too closed minded to understand, and too brainwashed to allow for healthy debate.
This has all been explained to Mr Kapow:
I stand accused of being a false accuser, but I reject this accusation and accuse right back.
So who is this masked crusader?
Naturally, the star of this story takes some steps to protect himself:
He uses Surfshark VPN to hide his IP
E-mail addresses he uses for account sign-ups are obvious throwaways.
He doesn't use his real name (or gender), doesn't appear in any videos, doesn't use his own voice to narrate the videos either.
However, there are some clues:
Based on this, we know that the protagonist is:
Male (this one's mostly based on his writing style and language)
In his 50s
With a squeaky voice (I just know it)
Most likely overweight (I'm just running with the stereotype here).
I asked DALL-E to produce an image of our protagonist based on these descriptors:
I think it nailed it. Never forget that this guy thinks it should be OK for him to have sex with your 14 year old daughter.
A couple of days ago a newcomer started a new community called "Controversial ideas" and began posting content.
I originally took it at face value, however it quickly became apparent that the "controversial ideas" were all just different angles of trying to normalize relationships between adults and under-age teenagers, under the guise of pseudo-intellectual debate on age of consent laws, brain development, etc.
A bit of digging made it clear that this was an individual with an agenda. He had started similar communities on several other instances using different usernames, all with the same objective and approach. His multitude of other social media accounts told a similar story and included real hot takes such as this one:
This individual has been banned and the community removed.
I don't know how much clearer I can make it that this kind of shit isn't and will never be tolerated here.
Seeing as this was the second pedophile that tried to set up shop here in the past month, I've become a bit concerned that there may be something about our previous mascot that is giving off the wrong impression. Maybe the mouse is too childish? Maybe it looks too young? I really don't know, but I've decided to change it just in case.
Our new mascot is much more aggressive, hopefully it sends the right message. I welcome your feedback on it.
This post keeps track of all instances that Lemdit is no longer federated with and the reason why they were blocked.
The Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:
Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:
If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
If they are acting as an attack vector towards us
10 July 2023
burggit.moe / lemmy.burger.rodeo - Defederated due to legal concerns. They host loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).
01 August 2023
lemmy.comfysnug.space - Defederated due to legal concerns. They host loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).
08 August 2023
detroitriotcity.com - Defederated due to legal concerns. I don't even know where to start with this one, they appear to host a suite of things that are illegal, among which loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).
Defederation explained
All Fediverse instances talk to each other. When you search for a community, for example, you will get results from any instance that has a community that matches your search terms.
If you subscribe to a community from another instance, then all content posted to that community will automatically be "federated" (shared) with our instance. In practical terms, this means our server downloads and stores a copy of that content so that it can display it to you and everybody else on our instance. This is the content you see when you click on "All" from the menu at the top:
To "defederate" is to ban an instance from sharing content with us. This means that when you search for content, you will not get any results from them. There is no ability to subscribe to their communities and anything they post on their instance will not be shared with our server.
I consider this to be an extreme measure, which is why we reserve it for servers that purposefully allow content that is illegal in our country of jurisdiction (New Zealand). Not doing so would put us at risk, since our server can potentially store a copy of content that is illegal.
Lestat is a status tracker for all popular Lemmy instances. It keeps track of uptime and provides automatic notifications when instances go down or recover.
I like keeping across what is happening with other Lemmy instances so lestat.org was born out of this curiosity.
I will add any instance to Lestat based on these prerequisites:
The instance is listed on join-lemmy.org
The instance doesn't host anything illegal in New Zealand
Notification service for admins
If you are an instance admin and want to get automatic e-mail notifications from Lestat when your instance goes down, message me and I will set this up for you.
hexbear.net is "A leftist social platform centered around community building through discussion, shitposting memes, and sharing content." They are fairly large:
It's becoming increasingly apparent that the largest Lemmy instance thinks it has a duty to protect its users against anything that might cause upset, sometimes before it even happens.
It was brought to my attention that lemmy.comfysnug.space also hosts "loli porn". This content is illegal in New Zealand as well as many other countries.
Needless to say they have been defederated and all their communities purged from our server.
I'm mostly posting this in the spirit of transparency as I don't think this affects anyone here.
Please let me know if you do come across another similar instance, there are simply too many of them out there for me to check proactively.
I sincerely hope that this was the last of them, but if there are more, I also don't think it's worth me making an announcement every time we defederate one. I may instead create a generic defederation post where we keep tabs on who we defederated and why, but I welcome your feedback.
As a reminder, the Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:
Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:
If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
lemmy.one has been down for a while now. I've personally noticed that it hasn't been working for over 24 hours, some comments suggest it may be longer than that:
lemmy.one is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with around 7.3k users.
The site does load, however it displays a Lemmy error. This shows that the Lemmy UI is still there and working, but the Lemmy back-end server process is not.
Based on this, it doesn't look similar to the disappearance of vlemmy.net and it's most likely just a technical issue.
So what is going on?
My guess is there are 3 likely scenarios for what went wrong:
The Lemmy server process crashed (it's known to happen from time to time)
This is an update gone wrong (the latest Lemmy update in particular is tricky as it requires a DB migration).
Some other mysterious event messed up the DB
This is a very long time to be struggling with a technical issue and the lack of communication is concerning.
It could be that:
The admin is just not available to deal with it right now due to real life reasons.
The DB is now a mess and the Lemmy server process can't be restarted.
I expect they have regular DB back-ups like everyone else and would've rolled back to a previous snapshot by now. I think the most likely scenario is that the admin just isn't available to deal with it.
To fix this requires actual server access, so even though lemmy.one had several Lemmy admins, it's unlikely that all of them have the required access to deal with this issue.
It would be interesting to hear if anyone managed to get in touch with lemmy.one's admin.
This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.
The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.
In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.
Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.
