yesterday .world had to turn off sign-up and even shut down shitposting community.
This is basically the front-door of Lemmy. And as others are starting to notice, 60K users after all the people seeking better and trying out things isn’t that many… And there are seemingly a lot of people who use multiple servers given the technical instability of Lemmy’s code… I am one of those people who spends 10 minutes a day on 4 servers, but I’m cutting back because content just isn’t there and it’s now often gaming topics and news making the rounds as duplicate stories over a 2 to 4 day period (besides memes)
Social media in general… there was so much Facebook hate for the past 8 years… but not much betterment came of it. Today looking over Reddit, it hasn’t really changed that much in the past 4 months… there was a group of dissatisfied people who don’t seem to want to actually build something better - just want to protest Reddit.
YouTube and TV advertising - that’s a huge topic. YouTube does have a lot of small-time original creators, but is the money the reason why? You can’'t make money on Reddit or Lemmy unless you have a business shop or something related to specialty topics (such as auto repair in a discussion community about same).
looks like other servers shut down image hosting
https://lemm.ee/post/5839513
“It will not possible to upload any new avatars or banners while this limit is in effect.”
yha, moderation isn’t just for posts and comments, and per-community moderation probably doesn’t work so well when new communities can be created easily (the mod being the creator who puts in offensive material). And let’s be honest, a lot of what has become routine shitposting and memes is “funny” because it tries to be offensive. Without Lemmy’s technical growing pains, that might be able to fit in the puzzle, but now it’s just people trying to normalize offense to keep new people from joining and roots from growing.
Reddit had built a ton of IP address and other fingerprinting even 13 years ago - being on an advertising network with partners like Google probably helps in identifying the same computer with multiple accounts…
A new update on the situation: https://lemm.ee/post/5905754
“As shared by the lemmy.world team, over the past few days, some people have been spamming one of their communities with CSAM images. Lemmy has been attacked in various ways before, but this is clearly on a whole new level of depravity, as it’s first and foremost an attack on actual victims of child abuse, in addition to being an attack on the users and admins on Lemmy.”
"For the longer term, I have some further ideas:
4) Invite-based registrations
I believe that one of the best ways to effectively combat spam and malicious users is to implement an invite system on Lemmy. I have wanted to work on such a system ever since I first set up this instance, but real life and other things have been getting in the way, so I haven’t had a chance. However, with the current situation, I believe this feature is more important then ever, and I’m very hopeful I will be able to make time to work on it very soon.
My idea would be to grant our users a few invites, which would replenish every month if used. An invite will be required to sign up on lemm.ee after that point. The system will keep track of the invite hierarchy, and in extreme cases (such as spambot sign-ups), inviters may be held responsible for rule breaking users they have invited.
While this will certainly create a barrier of entry to signing up on lemm.ee, we are already one of the biggest instances, and I think at this point, such a barrier will do more good than harm."