Lemmy's Image Problem
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The popular Reddit alternative's user count has grown a lot over the past year. One problem, though: users and admins can't delete images.

Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    78·
    9 months ago

    You’re not wrong to feel irked by this. However, if that’s the case, the Fediverse may not be for you. You’re probably better off over some place else, like Reddit or Bluesky, where decisions are taken centrally, investor money is driving development, and there’s a manager to complain to.

    Thanks for the laugh, I’ve been on the network for almost the entirety of its lifetime and witnessed every development and major change. I’ve even helped run a major project in the early days.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      In that case, none of the things you mention should be surprises, or even abnormal, really. These problems have plagued all of the Fediverse at some point, and they have never been solved.

      Perhaps you could enlighten me on what Fediverse software does take “privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed” into consideration, because I can’t think of any; they all just expect every other server in the network not to be malicious.

      I also don’t remember hearing anything from the Mastodon devs when the Lemmy communities that Mastodon users were following were uploading child porn to their local image caches, let alone anything user-facing. The CSAM spam may have targeted Lemmy, but on the rest of the Fediverse the “solution” seemed to be “defederate from all of Lemmy for a while” at best. The recent Japanese spam wave could just as well have been CSAM instead of pictures of cans of spam and the wave proved that the Fediverse in its current form just can’t cope with malicious actors.

      • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        71·
        9 months ago

        Perhaps you could enlighten me on what Fediverse software does take “privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed” into consideration, because I can’t think of any; they all just expect every other server in the network not to be malicious.

        Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, tentatively Bonfire, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Akkoma. Off the top of my head.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          In what way are those better? Don’t they still suffer from the privacy problems that come with federation? In fact, Peertube’s P2P nature makes it one of the least private and secure Fediverse implementations I know of. From what I can see experimenting with Pixelfed, PeerTube, and Akkoma, they’re suffering from the same privacy and user safety issues Lemmy suffers from. Like on Bluesky, the user-facing controls are in no way enforced when activities cross federation in any way, so they only work in whitelist-based, tight-knit communities or defederated instances.

          I find Friendica’s “expiration” to be quite disingenuous, because the language on the front page implies privacy features that can’t be attained in real life. That also goes for their controls, promising private chats that are only as private as the participating servers are willing to make them.

          Hubzilla and Streams seem very interesting. I’ll have to dig into those, they seem very promising.

          • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
            11·
            9 months ago

            In what way are those better? Don’t they still suffer from the privacy problems that come with federation?

            Yes, the issue is that Lemmy does not even attempt to allow you to delete the image. There is no control for the user to do this. It’s literally not possible.