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.

  • Skull giver
    8•1 year ago

    Some counter points

    • the software isn’t a finished product yet. We’re on 0.19 for a reason
    • that’s how ActivityPub works. There is one network I know of that can do this (Circles), but this works through encryption and breaks down if anyone you’ve shared your posts with gets hacked
    • I don’t know what you’d expect from them here. Should they have posted something like “Please don’t post illegal content, thanks”?
    • They are busy. There are basically two people developing this software for a laughably small amount of money. Software takes time, planning, and “I want this now” is not a reason to alter course.

    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.

    I agree that there should be a way to delete kmages… and there is. It’s a simple API call with an admin token that any server admin worthy their salt can execute. The user who uploaded the image also gets a token, but that disappears after you posted your image, unless you use an app that keeps it (there’s one on Android that does this!).

    I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to implement persistent storage of these tokens, so if you have the time to fix this issue, please open a pull request!

    • PenguinCoderEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      the Fediverse may not be for you. You’re probably better off over some place else,

      Just going to leave this here. Pretty sure this user knows about the fediverse quite a bit more than you’re assuming.

    • Sean TilleyOPMEnglish
      -1•1 year 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 giverEnglish
        5•1 year 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 TilleyOPMEnglish
          6•1 year 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 giverEnglish
            5•1 year 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]English
              1•1 year 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.

              • Skull giverEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                There is this little popup when you use the file browser to upload files:

                But you’re right, this could be better. Luckly, after all the drama, a fix is being released ahead of schedule, though I don’t know when the next official Lemmy release will be. Still, servers running on the nightly version of Lemmy should get this fixed shortly.