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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.

We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.

We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.

We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.

Take care, LW Team

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[-] devious@lemmy.world 261 points 1 year ago

You gotta do, what you gotta do!

Thanks as always for the hard work and transparency.

[-] lwadmin@lemmy.world 115 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the kindness!

[-] GONADS125@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I hope you guys are doing okay having to see all that shit.. No shame in reaching out to mental health professionals. Makes me sad imagining you guys picking up emotional baggage and trauma having to see all that to protect the community.

I appreciate you guys looking out for us, but I hope you all have proper support yourselves.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 180 points 1 year ago

Whew, I'm glad I got in before this or my fellow homo sapiens might not have noticed I was also a fellow homo sapiens like them and definitely not a robot.

[-] hemmes@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

You’re clearly a Mollusc

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

How dare you! I am no mere mollusc, I am a proud Todarodes pacificus and definitely not a robot squid.

[-] Dienes@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

OK BUT WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

I had a nightmare about electric sheep. Don't we all?

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[-] kadu@lemmy.world 149 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No place is safe from this, unfortunately. I moderated 2 big brazilian subreddits, and then decided to volunteer to help a smaller one. I had a day (and to be honest, an entire week) absolutely ruined when somebody did indeed set a bot to post large amounts of CSAM to the subreddit. Luckily I was online to quickly purge it all, and Reddit's admins did remove the accounts pretty much instantly, but I feel for every Lemmy admin that even caught a glimpse of this material and now have to purge their computers and honestly, their minds, from that. Sorry to hear it happened.

[-] Kethal@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

Two brazilian sounds like a lot.

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[-] snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

CSAM

I just looked up this acronym and am sorry I did.

[-] not_that_guy05@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Same but not sorry. I always called it CP but I guess this is more of a straight forward name.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the term CP (Child Porn) has always been a terrible name for it. It sounds weird, but "Child Porn" sounds much less dramatic than it is, like some sort of fringe porn. Meanwhile CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) make it a lot more clear that there is a child being abused.

[-] ericisshort@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Same, and to make sure no one else has to have it in their search history, CSAM stands for “Child Sexual Abuse Material.”

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[-] input@lemmy.world 130 points 1 year ago

Hope it restricts the attack surface, why do people have to be such knobs

[-] pretzelz@lemmy.world 134 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not wanting to be too conspiratorial, but it isn't necessarily people simply doing this out of the badness of their hearts. The fediverse is a disruptive platform and there are many parties with deep pockets that might happily funnel a little bit of cash to certain consultancies in certain countries to stop things and add friction to this platform before it really takes off. Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!

[-] Pregnenolone@lemmy.world 58 points 1 year ago

That sounds exactly like the badness in people’s hearts though.

[-] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

The corporate types behind such actions aren't people.

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[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

The alt right instance has been fucking with world since they were defederated...

This is something right up their alley, so the simplest solution is they're doing it.

[-] Steeve@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago

Come on people, Lemmy's user base is what, a few hundred thousand? A million tops? Which "parties with deep pockets" is this disrupting? The Lemmy userbase is a rounding error on the number of users of other popular social medias.

"Don't want to be too conspiratorial, but let me continue to drop a ridiculous conspiracy with no evidence"

[-] Grabbels@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And big corp wants to smother it before it’s bigger. It perfectly makes sense. It’s so much more difficult to kill a service/movement when it’s already widely adopted and popular. Identifying small, new players in the field and disrupting those takes very few resources for them, a rounding error, if you will.

The fediverse has the potential to be a threat to some big corps out there, and Lemmy is just one speck in a sea of a lot of specks. Together those specks are growing the fediverse, and the only way to disrupt it is to get rid of those specks.

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[-] DelvianSeek@lemmy.world 69 points 1 year ago

Good call. Thank you for doing what you need to do to support the site and protect the users as necessary. And as always, the honesty and transparency is appreciated.

[-] Astrealix@lemmy.world 68 points 1 year ago

Looks like even this place couldn't keep it up. Unfortunate. Thanks admins for the transparency though.

[-] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago

I think it's the right call honestly. We've grown so quick that it must be hard to manage by now.

[-] 007v2@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago

Thanks for all the work you do! It isn’t unappreciated.

[-] GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago

Hope it helps with the recent abuse.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://github.com/bumble-tech/private-detector

Do you guys think this could help? I remembered reading bumble open sourced their image detection system.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

If you could give me the numbers of new accounts monthly I would look into CloudFlare. If I can afford it I will even pay for it.

[-] pm_boobs_send_nudes@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

I don't blame you for taking that decision. But it's sad that this will deter legitimate users away, some of whom would've signed up otherwise.

[-] ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess I'm out of the loop, perhaps because I mostly browse communities I subscribed to, but...

What happened? Lots of spammy bots signing up and spamming the site? I guess I didn't notice where I was looking

Also, what does application based sign up mean?

Anyhow, Lemmy.World and Lemmy (in general) are growing nicely, so what's needed to defend them is cool.

Edit: fixed grammar

[-] Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Troll / spam accounts posted CSAM in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world. That spread with federation and every admin ended up involuntarily hosting such content.

Application based sign up means that if a user wants to subscribe they have to fill out a form and a .world admin gets to review it and approve or reject their sign up. It's a measure of controlling who gets in and limiting the amount of bots and possibly troll that join an instance.

[-] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago

To make it clear, the form is virtually the same as before with one additional question. It just asks you to state you read the note that is the same as the note in the post above. The application is virtually identical beyond that. But, the biggest difference, is like you said, an admin needs to approve it.

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is image posting temporarily turned off for lemmy.world users too?

Since last night, I've been unable to post (tested in memes@lemmy.world, memes@lemmy.ml, and lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world). Switched to an alt account on a different instance and had no issue.

(getting JSON error: unexpected character at line 1 column 1)

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[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago
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[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

Glad to hear. Obviously this is less than ideal, but working towards solutions is what's important.

[-] teruma@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Will this make it easier to reopen federation with instances that were concerned about abuse of our open sign up policy? (or was the issue with beehaw resolved while I wasn't looking?)

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 year ago

If it's temporary, likely not. The concern from most of the instances is that open subs mean literally anyone and anything can join, including bots which create account after account, just moving on when the original is banned. "We are closing open signups for now" is non committal, I'm betting the only way things get refederated is if World commits to this change for the long term.

[-] nantsuu@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago

Does this mean Beehaw will refederate?

[-] gk99@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

Considering this is a temporary measure, I imagine not. Lemmy.world has been under constant attacks as the #1 Lemmy instance and it's not going to stop just because bots can't get in automatically anymore.

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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
1469 points (100.0% liked)

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