As promised, if I brought the instance offline, I would give you a heads up in advance.
Here are the reasons for me coming to this decision-
Moderation / Administration
Lemmy has absolutely ZERO administration tools, other then the ability to create a report. This, makes it extremely difficult to properly administer anything.
As well, other then running reports and queries against the local database manually, I literally do not have insight into anything. I can’t even see a list of which users are registered on this instance, without running a query on the database.
Personal Liability
I host lemmyonline.com on some of my personal infrastructure. It shares servers, storage, etc. It is powered via my home solar setup, and actually doesn’t cost much to keep online.
However- for a project which compensates me exactly $0.00 USD (No- I still don’t take donations). It is NOT worth the additional liability I am taking on.
That liability being- currently trolls/attackers are literally uploading child-porn to lemmy. Thumbnails and content gets synced to this instance. At that point, I am on the hook for this content. This, also goes back to the problem of literally having basically no moderation capabilities either.
Once something is posted, it is sent everywhere.
Here in the US, they like to send no-knock raids out. That is no-bueno.
Project Inefficiencies
One issue I have noticed, every single image/thumbnail, appears to get cached by pictrs. This data is never cleaned up, never purged… so, it will just keep growing, and growing. The growth, isn’t drastic, around 10-30G of new data per week- however, this growth isn’t going to be sustainable, especially due to again- this project compensates me nothing. While- hosting 100G of content, isn’t going to be a problem. When we start looking 1T, 10T, etc… That costs money.
Its not as simple as tossing another disk into my cluster. The storage needs redundancy. So, you need multiple disks there.
Then, you need backups. A few more disks here.
Then, we need offsite backups. These cost $/TB stored.
I don’t mind hosting putting some resources up front to host something that takes a nominal amount of resources. However- based on my stats, its going to continue to grow forever as there is no purge/timeout/lifespan attached to these objects.
I don’t enjoy lemmy enough to want to put up with the above headaches.
Lets face it. You have already seen me complain about the general negativity around lemmy.
The quality of content here, just isn’t the same. I have posted lots of interesting content to try and get collaboration going. But, it just doesn’t happen.
I just don’t see nearly as much interesting content, as I want to interact with.
Summary-
I get no benefit from hosting lemmy online. It was a fun side project for a while. I refuse to attempt to monetize it as well.
As such, since I don’t enjoy it, and the process of keeping on top of the latest attacks for the week is time consuming, and boresome, The plan is simple.
The servers will go offline 2023-09-04.
If you wish to migrate your account to another instance-
Here is a tool recently released.
Don’t blame you, but I’m pretty sure this is the intent of the attackers. This is a takedown method.
Hi there
Hey, just wanted to provide some important info about Lemmy Handshake since it’s mentioned here. Maybe too late, but oh well, I just got the app built and ran.
So, first thing, despite the readme mentioning saved posts and blocked users, none of that’s in the app yet. It currently only syncs subscriptions
Next, it only syncs subscriptions that are already federated with both instances. You can see which instances fail while the process is going, but as soon as it finishes, that information is gone, meaning you’ll have to manually compare your sub lists in both instances.
Last, don’t bother compiling it yourself like me. There haven’t been any major updates since the last release, just some minor bugfixes. Save yourself the time.
WELL… instance is still here.
Just- going to leave pictrs disabled for the time being, as there has been some changes merged, which will allow me to disable a lot of the problems, causing child porn / CASM content to get synced into my instance.
So… gonna keep this running, with the hopes those features hit mainstream soon. Just- don’t expect images to work.
TBH, I always thought the image uploading was a bad idea, apart from avatars of course. I always use dedicated image hosts because I don’t want to contribute to eating through everyone’s space.
I don’t mind hosting images for… local communities.
But, having hundreds of gigs of cached memes, isn’t nice.
Especially when casm gets cached
Lemmy needs an attorney (or several) to outline what exactly is afforded by safe harbor provisions. I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice, but having fought against the application of safe harbor provisions being used as an excuse by companies worth tens to hundreds of billions of dollars as an excuse to not moderate, I know just a little about them.
When all of this had just started to really get rolling - back in the early 90s - ISPs (including institutions like universities) made the argument that they are common carriers. That is, the phone company isn’t responsible if someone makes terroristic or other criminal plans over the phone, because they are a common carrier. They simply carry communication, but disavow any ability to police it. ISPs argued for, and for the most part received, a common carrier type of status.
A couple of things have changed since then. First, in classic “you don’t fuck with the money” style, we saw DMCA and other laws come about since then. Second, services started taking more responsibility for their data - first by hosting it and then deciding what to serve to whom in what order. Both of those depart from the common carrier argument, but additional safe harbor laws were written that do a carve out for companies that perform a reasonable level of due diligence, eg by responding to takedown notices.
Lemmy is far closer to usenet or email than it is to reddit. There is no central service, but rather individual files that are synchronized between servers via an algorithm that is content-neutral.
Back in the Elder Days I was working in my university’s computer labs, and we were explicitly instructed that we could not (for instance) stop people from browsing porn in the labs because once you start policing content you could be on the hook to police all of it. I was and remain skeptical that this was a serious legal interpretation as opposed to someone who doesn’t actually understand the laws doing their best. On the other hand, common carrier principles do seem to say that if you’re just serving up a protocol, even if you’re hosting the files locally (like usenet), you don’t have the ability to detect offending content.
tl;dr - EFF or someone needs to weigh in on this question
