Hey yall! Just wanted pop on here to announce some things to keep yall in the loop.

We're here, we're alive. A lot of the team has just been pretty busy IRL so it's been more a focus on making things run smoothly rather than figuring out how to proactively improve things. Thankfully I personally am a lot less busy IRL (for now) and will be using it as an opportunity to put together staff apps and look thru inactive communities a bit more, as well as trimming down the sidebar and fixing up the docs pages.

NSFW Posts show up without needing to login now!

For those who may not have already noticed, but our lovely backend team (major thanks to @yay!) have made it a bit easier to navigate communities and posts without needing to login. Others on other instances should be able to browse local communities here now as well as to be able to access new communities better. We are working on improving the front end and although NSFW posts are blurred by default we are going to make an

We are working on figuring out a solution or at some sort of heads up. No, we aren't all celebrity posts.

It's quite sad to watch unfold, but the admin of rammy has been basically MIA all month and exploding-heads users and admin (which we have been de-federated from for a while) has taken notice and has decided to invade and set up shop there to just generally push their stuff into the federation. Entire front page is a hate fest against LGBT people and just general foul bigotry. Hopefully the rammy admin comes back and cleans stuff up, and then we can hopefully re-federate (if they want to.)

Just wanted to give a heads up in case anyone was curious why another instance was added to the blocked server list :/

Hey yall, just wanted to chime in with a quick update on why we were down and have gone down a few times these past few days.

So... for those who don't know a bit on the backend way of how lemmy works right now, it's a lil more than a mess. Lemmy itself uses very little computing resources, you could probably run a decent instance on a toaster (I wouldn't suggest it though) but the problem that arises rapidly is the way photos are managed. The photo database downloads images both that are uploaded and federated. There is an option to disable caching for federated NSFW posts by unchecking enable NSFW within the instance admin panel. That's the only option related disabling federated images as of right now.

You see where I'm going with this, with this instance being as large as it is? Our photo database has been filling up pretty rapidly. We are attempting to troubleshoot solutions to prevent caching all federated content. Unfortunately as our backend team is attempting to figure tha

Hey yall and happy Friday! (Or Saturday... depending on where you are).

I was just wanting to pop on here with a condensed list of some announcements of things we are working out, goings on within the community and the lemmyverse, and just generally have a place for any questions, bug reports, or chat within the instance. Unsure what the frequency of these announcements will be, but if I need to make more I will.

How often do you want to see these kinds of threads? Also, I will be responding to this thread all weekend.

Anyway, below is a list of announcements and shiz. Lets get into it!

Addressing Bots

Unfortunately, we had really not much of a choice but to enable application only registration currently. There was a large influx of spam bots, which does suck but we are approving them as fast as we can. It's likely this will stay, but we will reassess this as Lemmy improves. Currently the question is "why do you want to join this instance" which is a little vague, but un

The docs site is still under construction, so expect it to change and more pages to be added and it to improve progressively.

Thank you for your patience yall. It seems our mitigation efforts worked and we were likely never in danger. If you are concerned about other accounts on affected instances, it is unlikely your personal data was breached. Keep a look out for more info on those instances though as they will likely explain things more.

We have little information currently, but we may at least lock the site down for preemptive safety reasons. There seems to be a serious XSS vulnerability within lemmys code. We have disabled community creation temporarily and are contemplating taking the site down temporarily as well. Please find us below and stay safe, ya'll.

https://mastodon.world/@lemmynsfw https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org

EDIT: For the time being we have disabled federation, new user sign ups, and community creation.

We quietly defederated temporarily earlier because lemmy.world seemed to be compromised earlier in some way, but then it was fixed. Now it's happened again. Unsure what is going on over there but there isn't much use speculating. They have been dealing with weird redirects to shock sites like lemonparty (throwback). Whoever has compromised them seems to have some early 2010s internet sense of humor I guess.

Anyway, once they have things under control and an announcement is made we will refederate ASAP. For the time being, please avoid going to their homepage for the time being as we have no idea what the nature of the compromise of their site is and to what extent.

EDIT: seems lemmy.blahaj.zone just was as well. :(

DM me your matrix username or post it below and I'll message you, then invite you. Or join the lemmynsfw public matrix group and state your desire to join and what communities you mod.

When this instance first started, I don't think it was fully anticipated how large it would get. The place where this instance was when I first stepped up as admin was wholly unsustainable long term. There was little direction as to what the instance's intentions as a website were, and the specific intentions it seemed to lean towards (being a sort of reddit 2.0) is not something we have the ability to handle. Neither monetarily nor legally.

The expectations that this instance specifically would be replacing reddit nsfw content entirely is not realistic, and the expectations that have been had for what all of lemmy is capable of has been much higher than what the backend side of things is at right now. Rome was not built in a day, and the same is true for communities of this nature. We are utilizing a platform based on a philosophy that hasn't been widely used outside of email since the early Internet, while now having to work the laws and limitations that the current Internet now pre

Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.

I know there's been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it's been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.

Here's a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.

For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.

Also, there's another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.

The downtime was brief like we hoped, everything seems to be working fine.

@[email protected] just informed me of such, please be aware. If all goes it'll be around 5 minutes or so. We have a mastodon account as well to provide updates, so be sure to check here or visit our matrix room if things seem to be taking a bit longer than that.

It can't really be fully predicted how intense the migration, but we are expecting quite a bit.. if previous platforms (especially twitter) are any trend to look towards, expect traffic to intensify a bit. Probably even more than it already has.

For those coming from reddit Please bear with us as well, as well as the rest of the lemmyverse. If you're new to lemmy and the fediverse as platform, you may be confused as how to best find communities right now. lemmyverse.net/communities is a good start, make sure to tick the NSFW community display option. Welcome to the community, and bear with us due to the limitations lemmy currently has as a platform. Things are improving, but for the time being our current content policy is quite strict. It is temporary, and will be elaborated more so in the future as lemmys mod tools improve. There will be a link added to the sidebar that provides info as to why this is.

Be mindful of making sure your **NSFW

Both host content that are against our content policy and have had issues with users from those sites entering our community crossposting content that violates our content policy. We are discussing defederating other instances as well. There is discussion of lemmit.online being defederated because it pretty much exclusively scrapes reddit content and reposts it, and some content creators have expressed discomfort. If there's other instances that might be worth considering defederating from, just post and it'll be added to the current discussion.

and before anyone brings it up, lemmygrad defederated with us.

This isn't a dictatorship but I ask that you please behave in the comment section and at least try to understand why we are defederating.

Hey yall! It's gavi here! It's been quite a whirlwind over these past few weeks. Yesterday our lovely @yay made a post in regard to wanting to take a step away from lemmynsfw, and there was a lot of confusion from that post so I'm here now to talk about some of things that have occurred behind the scenes.

Who is hosting now?

Right now, our team is expanding and changing. @yay will still be doing primary hosting, but we now have more back-end admins and a more carefully coordinated backend team spread across time zones. We are discussing migrating the server, as well as other things. When any changes are expected to occur, an announcement will be made. This will not a profit-based project, so bear with us here.

What about the content policy? Is scat banned, whats the deal?

Right now, as lemmy expands, we will be having a temporary pause on specific niche content that may potentially risk our instance being defederated. This is not permanent, and we have no personal qualms