I am seeing a lot of fearmongering and misinformation regarding recent events (CSAM being posted in now closed large lemmy.world communities). I say this as someone who brought attention to this with other admins as I noticed things were federating out.

Yes, this is an issue and what has happened in regards to CSAM is deeply troubling but there are solutions and ideas being discussed and worked on as we speak. This is not just a lemmy issue but an overall internet issue that affects all forms of social media, there is no clear cut solution but most jurisdictions have some form of safe harbor policy for server operators operating in good faith.

A good analogy to think of here is if someone was to drop something illegal into your yard that is open to the public. If someone stumbled upon said items you aren’t going to be hunted down for it unless there is evidence showing you knew about the items and left them there without reporting them or selling/trading said items. If someone comes up to you and says “hey, there’s this illegal thing on your property” you report it and hand it over to the relevant authorities and potentially look at security cameras if you have any and send them over with the authorities then you’d be fine.

A similar principle exists online, specifically on platforms such as this. Obviously the FBI is going to raid whoever they want and will find reasons to if they need to, but I can tell you for near certainty they probably aren’t as concerned with a bunch of nerds hosting a (currently) niche software created by 2 communists as a pet project that gained popularity over the summer because a internet business decided to shoot itself in the foot. They are specifically out to find people who are selling, trading, and making CSAM. Those that knowingly and intentionally distribute and host such content are the ones that they are out for blood for.

I get it. This is anxiety inducing especially as an admin, but so long as you preserving and reporting any content that is brought to your attention in a timely manner and are following development and active mitigation efforts, you should be fine. If you want to know in more detail click the link above.

I am not a lawyer, and of course things vary from country to country so it’s a good idea to check from reputable sources on this matter as well.

As well, this is a topic that is distressing for most normal well adjusted people for pretty obvious reasons. I get the anxiety over this, I really do. It’s been a rough few days for many of us. But playing into other peoples anxiety over this is not helping anyone. What is helping is following and contributing the discussion of potential fixes/mitigation efforts and taking the time to calmly understand what you as an operator are responsible for within your jurisdiction.

Also, if you witnessed the content being discussed here no one will fault you for taking a step away from lemmy. Don’t sacrifice your mental health over a volunteer project, it’s seriously not worth it. Even more so if this has made you question self hosting lemmy or any other platform like it, that is valid as well as it should be made more clearer that this is a risk you are taking on when making any kind of website that is connected to the open internet.

  • frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Also, are the images even federated? I know the current line of thinking is that they are, but I could not find them in my local pictrs volume. Not that I wanted to, mind you. But I looked and only saw one picture in there from the problematic time period, and it happened to be one of my user’s avatars. And one of the CSAM posts federated with me, I know for a fact, because I saw the comments even though I couldn’t see the picture (and I feel horrible for those users who saw it, some of them were obviously traumatized).

    I’m keeping a close eye on my pictrs volume and really scrutinizing who I allow on my instance after this whole thing, but on the whole, I’m not overly concerned, even as a US-based self-hoster. I registered with the DMCA and will fully comply with any and all takedown requests, even silly ones like copyright. I don’t have the finances or time for prolonged legal battles.

    Edit: Figured it out. My pictrs container didn’t have an external network definition, so it was timing out while retrieving external images.

    • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeOP
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      1 year ago

      Right now all images are cached by default, even external ones. A copy is downloaded into pictrs. A fix is being worked on to disable that very very soon soon. It was being worked on before this due to storage cost issues ballooning long term but yeah.

      • frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Huh, do I have that misconfigured by some happy accident? My pictrs volume is only around 50Mb after running my instance for over a month. I have both LCS and Lemmony federating popular content, too…

        • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, that’s really weird. 3 GB for my pictrs volume. 50 MB sounds like it’s not enabled at all, can you upload images to your instance?

        • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I have to regularly clear the cache on my devices for Memmy as it will continue growing (was beyond 4GB when I noticed one time eating my phones space). I’m assuming it’s saving images on device too.

    • hitagi@ani.social
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      1 year ago

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