I also really like the tunnels feature. It makes self hosting at home easy for those under NAT/CGNAT or whatever it was called.

This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here.

0.19.4 provides a way to see uploaded images (although not the best) but this version was only recently released so I can see where the frustration is coming from especially since the CSAM attacks happened nearly a year ago. At the time, I had to make a copy of pictrs, view everything on a file manager, and manually remove those images. People can still upload images without anyone seeing it however.

It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with.

This was fixed in 0.19.3 (released 7 months ago) where you can disable image “caching”. This has solved storage costs for us together with pictrs’ image processing.

plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery

It’s unfortunate that we need this. Not everybody has the resources to run fedisafety nor does everyone live in USA where they can use Cloudflare’s CSAM scanner. I think a good way to deal with the issue is to have images that are not public, not be stored (or have no private images at all). This way images can be easily reported.

Overall, I understand the frustration and to some degree I also feel the same but I also limit my expectations considering the nature of the project.

Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing?

They are cheaper. Locations outside US/EU and very few countries in Asia are sometimes called “exotic” and can be a bit expensive. Lemmy also has this issue where servers that are distant from each other lag behind.

Porkbun asks for your ID now so that might not be “privacy-respecting” but their CS is very helpful from my experience.

I have domains in Netim and Spaceship, and I have no problems with either so far.

Mods and admins can remove posts but they do stay only if they’re “removed”. But if they’re “purged”, then they’re deleted from the server.

pict-rs has the option to compress images. Ours is set to WEBP with 1280 pixels either side max.

I don’t remember which update it was but newer versions of Lemmy use significantly less database storage.

I recommend checking out lowendtalk.com if you’re shopping for VPS hosting providers.

I did say the complaint:

The mod tools are too basic and barebones

I also gave three ideas that are (1) manually done by mods/admins, (2) manually done by users, (3) automated by mods/admins.

On a small subreddit I moderate, we have automod automatically queue posts at a certain age. If your account is less than a day old, your post is hidden for public viewing while the mods manually approve it. We had to deal with a lot of spam bots and this was a good solution for us.

I believe the way the report feature works on Lemmy is that it sends out to the mods of the community and all the admins. It doesn’t work quite well when I don’t know the rules of a community. “No memes on mondays”, is that really something I (as an admin) should be worried about? That’s not my job.

I hope this clears things up.

The mod tools are too basic and barebones. I’d appreciate if we can get:

• Post approval system for new or low-karma accounts (it can be karma for local communities)
• Reporting system with multiple options (very hard to implement in the fediverse as everyone has different rules) so that the reports are sent to the proper channels. Admins shouldn’t have to deal with community-specific rules (for example, “memes only on mondays”).
• Automoderator (these might already exist? I have not tried them.)

I don’t know if I should split this comment into three or not but they’re some general suggestions to address the complaint of basic mod tools.

Proxy is inaccurate. Server is a better term.

Matrix but then I realized I only used it for the bridges so now I use Beeper instead. RIP my Matrix server which only served two people.

I really want to say Gandi but they charge too much now and removed the free mailboxes.

Anyway, I’ll vouch for Netim. Their prices are similar to (old) Gandi and they have a mailbox too. I’m looking into Spaceship for some other domains because they’re really cheap.

I see. I’m guessing this is only for v0.5.0 alpha because I don’t see these options in the v0.4.2 release.

How long are they cached for? I still have cached images from over 2 months ago.

I’m not from the US and I tried requesting for one (NCMEC credentials) and this is what they told me:

if your company or site is located internationally, we are unable to register you at this time

The CSAM scanning tool didn’t require NCMEC credentials back then. At least that’s the context I’m getting from this short thread in 2021.

I also tried looking into other tools like PhotoDNA but it also isn’t available in my country.

edit: just to add, the blog post you linked is old (2019). They changed the UI. If you log into the Cloudflare dashboard, it looks like this:

And yes, they do require a 30 minute Zoom call according to the email exchange I had with the NCMEC.

They are. We’ve manually removed these images from our instance (and are following the guidelines provided by local laws).

I hope this gets merged soon. Saves us on storage space and makes monitoring media uploads easier.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3897

It does say “thumbnails” but as far as I know, Lemmy (or pictrs) makes a copy of the full image too. I don’t know if this PR includes full images.

images hosted on the same server as the federated community will directly link

https://ani.social/post/288601 - This image is uploaded from a user on the same instance as the federated community (lemmy.world) but the image is cached.

images uploaded somewhere other than the federated community will be copied into cache

https://ani.social/post/285354 - This image is uploaded from a user on a different instance (lemm.ee) from the federated community (lemmy.world) but the image is not cached.

The behaviour is pretty weird. Hopefully we can disable image caching/copying-over-locally so we don’t have to deal with problematic images hosted by other instances.