One thing you’ll learn quickly is that Lemmy is version 0 for a reason.

Fair warning 😆

One problem with a big list is that different instances have different ideas over what is acceptable.

Yeah, that would be where being able to choose from any number of lists, or to freely create one comes in handy.

create from it each day or so yo run on the images since it was last destroyed.

Unfortunately, for this usecase, the GPU needs to be accessible in real time; there is a 10 second window when an image is posted for it to be processed [1].

Probably the best option would be to have a snapshot

Could you point me towards some documentation so that I can look into exactly what you mean by this? I’m not sure I understand the exact procedure that you are describing.

[…] if you’re going to run an instance and aren’t already on Matrix, make an account. It’s how instance admins tend to keep in contact with each other.

This is good advice.

Fediseer provides a web of trust. An instance receives a guarantee from another instance. That instance then guarantees another instance. It creates a web of trust starting from some known good instances. Then if you wish you can choose to have your lemmy instance only federate with instances that have been guaranteed by another instance. Spam instances can’t guarantee each other, because they need an instance that is already part of the web to guarantee them, and instances won’t do that because they risk their own place in the web if they falsely guarantee another instances (say, if one instance keeps guaranteeing new instances that turn out to be spam, they will quickly lose their own guarantee).

How would one get a new instance approved by Fediseer?

There is a chat room where instance admins share details of spam accounts, and it’s about the best we have for Lemmy at the moment (it works quite well, really, because everyone can be instantly notified but also make their own decisions about who to ban or if something is spam or allowed on their instance - because it’s pretty common that things are not black and white).

Yeah I think I’m more on the side of this, now. The chat is a decent, and workable solution. It’s definitely a lot more hands-on/manual, but I think it’s a solid middle ground solution, for the time being.

If you ban a user […], then if you are automating this you end up with the issue of if anyone screws up then how do you get someone’s account unbanned on all those instances?

The idea would be that if they are automatically banned, then the removal of the user from the list would then cause them to be automatically unbanned. That being said, you did also state:

If you ban a user and opt to remove all their content (which you should, with spam)

How do you get all their content restored

To which I say that I hadn’t considered that the content would be deleted 😜. I was assuming that the user would only be blocked, but their content would still be physically on the server — it would just be effectively invisible.

how do you trust all these people to never, ever, ever get it wrong?

The naively simple idea was that the banned user could open an appeal to get their name removed from the blocklist. Also, keep in mind that the community’s trust in the blocklist is predicated on the blocklist being accurate.

The first one is who controls it?

Ideally, nobody. Anyone could make their own blocklist, and one could choose to pull from any of them.

Sure, but (in the USA) an investigation precedes a criminal case [2], and a court order is part of that. I directly cite, for example, 18 U.S. Code § 1509 - Obstruction of court orders [1]:

Whoever, by threats or force, willfully prevents, obstructs, impedes, or interferes with, or willfully attempts to prevent, obstruct, impede, or interfere with, the due exercise of rights or the performance of duties under any order, judgment, or decree of a court of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

NY Times vs Njalla

Do you have an official record of them not complying with an official court-ordered subpoena? I looked into “NYT vs Njalla”, and it seems like it was the NYT making a private request to Njalla under threats of legal action, but no legal action followed [1][2].

It also setup in such a way as to not cause a downtime if the checker goes down.

Oh? Would the fallback be that it simply doesn’t do a check? Or perhaps it could disable image uploads if the checker is down? Something else? Presumably, this would be configurable.

With any decent bandwidth, it shouldn’t be an issue for most.

It’s not only the bandwidth; I just fundamentally don’t relish the idea of public traffic being directed to my local network.

Not all web traffic, just the images to check.

Ah, yeah, my bad this was a lack of clarity on my part; I meant all image traffic.

A lot of precedent exists for not complying.

Would you mind citing a case? I’m curious.

It comes down to the individual company on whether or not to fight requests for user information.

Wouldn’t this simply be obstruction of justice?

I just have trust issues, you don’t need to mind my crazy ramblings.

Concerns about privacy and anonymity are perfectly valid. Ideally, I would want my involvement in a venture like this to be completely anonymous, but there are practical limitations (generally limited by how much added complexity/added risk one wants to put up with).

I’m saying if you payed for a service to host your instance remotely. The domain, the site pages, the the database, everything. Then, everything on the domain would be tied to your person and the service providers have a certain power over your instance aside from just turning off your domain.

Ah, okay, I was under the assumption that the domain was purchased through a separate, independent provider, rather than through the same provider as that of the VPS.

they might allow subpeonas from various companies who request the info.

“Allow” is an interesting choice of words. A subpoena is legally binding (depending on the jurisdiction). One could circumvent this by purchasing a domain anonymously, but I’m not currently aware of a reputable domain provider that allows anonymous purchasing of domains.

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Addendum (2024-11-11T23:38Z):

I just found Njalla which seems to allow anonymous purchasing of domains, but idk how reputable they are.