can you think of any solution that is not a variation of “keep finding fresh volunteers to work until they burn out”?

how would paying admins prevent burnout? the only difference i see here is that it is probably easier to find people willing to do it as a paid job than volunteers, but they can both burn out. this would just change it from “keep finding fresh volunteers” to “keep finding fresh job applicants”.

Ruud and Stux are not the only people involved.

I’m personally only involved in Ruud’s side of things (mostly .world instances). Stux’ platforms are managed separately, I can’t say too much about those. Afaik finances between Ruud’s instances and Stux’ instances are also separate.

On the .world side, we currently have 6 active members for infra. For moderation, LW currently has 4 active instance admins plus some community team members with elevated privileges. Other .world platforms have moderation separate from LW. We certainly don’t have resources to hire professional admins, but I’m sure that we would find a viable solution if Ruud ever wanted to leave things behind. Not all solutions require paying someone a salary for it, which seems to be your implication here.

I don’t think “too big to fail” is as much of a factor here as the fact that LW is not the only FHF platform. Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit behind Lemmy.World and our other platforms, existed before Lemmy.World already. While the Lemmy moderation team is working mostly independently from the rest of FHF, if the LW admin team disappeared there would still be FHF in a position to search for new admins and probably also at least temporarily step in without requiring to shut down the instance.

I don’t see us going down anytime soon, and at current user numbers I don’t think there’s going to be a major difference in moderation workload with the influx of users compared to what we already have, but it really is not great for decentralization. We already try delegating the majority of moderation to community moderators where applicable, where on a lot of other instances the admin teams seem to be more involved in addressing community reports on admin level as well. For the most part we’re dealing only with instance level topics in the admin team and provide some additional tooling to improve report notifications to community mods. There are even various benefits from a moderation perspective when users are all local and not remote, as with federation a lot of signals that would allow various types of abuse are unfortunately lost. That said, I would still prefer if there were more stable and larger instances overall, while not having a single instance stand out as massively larger than any other one. Friendly “competition” is almost always beneficial for everyone involved.

lemm.ee being the second largest instance and the shutdown only being announced less than a month before is unfortunately also not something that gives people looking for a stable instance much confidence. I hope this won’t scare too many users away from Lemmy and that most will just find a new instance in the Fediverse.

Instance moderation and moderation in general are unfortunately tasks that can be very challenging at scale, even with just a few thousand users, especially when dealing with drama. It’s not really a surprise that there are somewhat frequently posts from larger instances looking for new admins, while older admins on the same instance are becoming less active. Even if people aren’t exhausted from their involvement, their circumstances in life may change, or they may no longer be interested in Lemmy as a platform in general, leading to a number of reasons why admins may not be as active as it seems when looking at the list of admins in an instance sidebar. It’s often a thankless job with a lot of things happening in the background to deal with spam, trolls and other issues, which most users won’t even see when done right.

tbh it’s probably not going to be too complicated to switch to 1.0. the current api is generated from lemmy-js-client, but 1.0 api has an official openapi file. if there is a decently usable openapi generator for go that would probably not be too complicated to swap in instead and adjust the api calls in mlmym code.

already did. it’s the same person running the infrastructure, although moderation of mstdn.party and mstdn.plus is handled by someone else.

we’ve since been in contact with the person running these services and the material has been taken down on lemmy.one, as well as lemmy.one closing down in three months.

we’re still discussing in our team how we will deal with this going forward and will be posting a new announcement about this in the coming days.

you can read https://lemmy.world/post/29550945 for our previous writeup about this.

it’s a combination of multiple issues.

lemmy federation has improved significantly over the past years, so if this was happening with lemmy instances today, especially online ones involved, this would be much less of an issue.

the original user posting this stuff was on a kbin instance. kbin/mbin still do not support federating bans of users. kbin is basically dead, mbin is tracking that here. when this was originally removed on kbin this never federated out to other platforms.

the next problem is that the original instance is no longer there, so attempting to address this with community bans from lemmys side is not working anymore if the user isn’t known to the instance anymore, as it can’t be refetched from the source. if the instances that the related communities are hosted on purged this user in the past they wouldn’t be able to federate out a community ban anymore.

another problem is that lemmy is typically configured in a way where it creates a local copy of thumbnails if no thumbnail url is provided by the source, which is what lead to a local copy of this material. in the end i consider this only a secondary issue, as while most people would rather not have this stored on their servers at all, if you allow media uploads you can never be 100% sure about the content uploaded to your server. this is therefore typically something where providers are expected to take action once they become aware of it. some providers are also taking preventative measures like scanning uploads, comparing to hash databases of known csam, etc. had the original instance ban or community bans been performed properly this would at least have removed public access to the stuff, as the media filenames are randomly generated and not guessable.

it’s generally not impossible to prevent stuff from returning to your instance once you have taken it down properly, but in cases where federation didn’t work, which could be for a wide range of reasons, including your instance being misconfigured during maintenance, your instance being defederated from an instance involved in the removal, and others, it may require local action. if i ban a user then no new content form that user is going to come to LW until they are unbanned again. this includes manually fetching posts or other content, so if i purge an old post of theirs the post wouldn’t be able to come back until the user gets unbanned.

the problem isn’t being able to see them in the thread but that you can’t open the user profile, so you don’t see if there are any comments.

certainly not something i’m willing to risk. defederated them now.

the stuff is still up on lemmy.one, months from the original report, with zero indication that they care about it in the slightest.

i’m tempted to add their domains to our automod (only removal), but i’ll discuss this in our team before doing so.

even if there are multiple people involved in the operation of this discourse forum, even this announcement is by jonah, who as far as i can tell is the head of these projects and also owner of the associated US companies. if this was something ran by a different team and they’d be able to separate themselves from jonah’s (in)actions then it might be a different story, but as it is right now, it seems that all these services related to PrivacyGuides are operated by the same entity.

Now for the other weird bit. If I enable secret mode, the website works fine.

most likely the bad 404 response was also cached in your web browser. try clearing your cache or doing a reload with ctrl+f5 or cmd+shift+r.

we had an issue related to incorrectly caching 404 responses earlier but that was a few hours before your post. it should already have been resolved when you posted this.

sorry about the late response, got a lot of stuff going on currently and it seemed like you got useful replies here already anyway when i checked before.

we currently have a rule in place that blocks traffic with too high of a threat score. this rule was implemented before i joined, i’ll have to check with the team about the original reason for this and if we want to relax this.

at least the error message should be improved if we can do that, i think that’s just returning a static message currently.

it was just the purges and the emails being broken at the time. once we discovered the breakage we immediately started working on fixing it. the problem was that we initially missed that it broke.

Hello @Sergio@slrpnk.net,

our registration application system is completely automated and we’re making it very clear on our signup page what text you need to provide in order for your application to be approved.

Additionally, you should have received an email about your registration being rejected within a minute of verifying your email. Unfortunately your application fell within a window of these notifications being broken on our end, as we had to fix some stuff following our recent Lemmy update. Other users will generally receive this notification when their application is rejected.

As you explained why you’d want to sign up on lemmy.world rather than entering the required text your application had been denied. Our application processing system is also purging accounts from the database when the application gets rejected, so the username is available again and you’ll be able to sign up again with the same name.