Lemmy's Image Problem
wedistribute.orgThe 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.
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I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.
Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.
Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.
Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?
The thing that really gets me with these, is that we are 2-4 devs working on software used by over 40k ppl. It is absolutely impossible to please everyone, and fix every issue, there just isn’t enough of us.
Oftentimes we ask for ppl to do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, and many of them do.
Anyone can look at our github profiles and see how busy we’ve been, and how many moderation related issues we’ve been working on, this is all out in the open. Yet writers of these articles somehow never bother to look, or reach out to us for questions. The amount of entitlement and second-hand rumors is really dissapointing.
I’ve reviewed both your and @Nutomic’s comments, your latest blog updates, and GitHub PR’s, and added a section accordingly: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/lemmy-image-problem/#giving-credit
Thank you for your hard work, and for taking necessary steps to improve something that is essential for instance operators.
Thanks that is a bit better. Unfortunately people who have already read the article wont see the update, and even people who read it now may not read all the way to the end, and still leave with a negative impression. Still its better than nothing.
To get an idea how most Lemmy users feel, have a look at this thread. Practically every comment is positive about Lemmy, you can hardly find any negative sentiment. And certainly no one cares about this image deletion issue, which proves that the complaints of a few individuals are completely blown out of proportion.
I can confirm there is a silent majority of comerads. This is the thread that drove me to be a monthly donor. Thanks for everything.
Thanks for the donation!
As a user, I love lemmy, and I want to thank you and the other devs that work tirelessly to develop it.
Also as a user I value the ability to manage my data, and hope to see image deletion implemented when you’re able to do so.
After having read the Nightmare piece, my decision was to stop posting images directly to lemmy. To share images, I’m going to self host an Imgur like service so if I do want to delete an image, I can.
I’m not a developer, and can’t contribute code to address the problem, but, at least for myself, I’ve got a solution I can implement.
To chime in: Yes, people are positive about Lemmy. I like Lemmy, people like Lemmy. And Lemmy users in general want to see activity at Lemmy. Who wouldnt? That’s kind of a given… but still I want Lemmy to continue to evolve in functionality. That doesnt contradict itself?
And if someone points out that certain things arent technically possible at the moment, I as a user would expect that this isnt considered a “complaint” or a “negative sentiment”.
Especially when it’s a functionality that might have legal implications. Does “no one care” about that because people think it’s unnecessary? Or because they have never noticed before that this isnt possible? The GDPR is not a joke, and foss does not have an exemption clause for adhering to it. Additionally a lot of people on Lemmy are very privacy-conscious.
Therefore I think it’s great that this issue has been brought up now and you guys are working on a fix for that. Thanks for all of your work on this project, it’s really appreciated.
https://opensource.net/right-way-contribute-open-source/
The day to day drama in corporate software development is MUCH more meaningless than what you’re dealing with.
If you can take a moment to move your massive, fragile ego out of the way, you’ll realize it’s not a hit piece. It’s criticism of your behavior in reaction to what is frankly a reasonable set of requests.
Journalism is not just about serving as a propagandic mouthpiece to lionize you and your work. Sometimes, I have to report on subjects that are frankly horrible, people acting shitty, and how people in spaces react to that.
This issue is basic fucking table stakes for user safety and data compliance, and the fact that it still does not exist after four years of being a project is wild to me. It creates liabilities for admins. The fact that it’s still a problem, right now, illustrates that these things are not direct concerns in how you design software.
Your comments were in the GitHub issues.
So this is how you see me, all based on two issues out of thousands and never having talked with me directly. Honestly this comment would be a good reason to ban you for harassment and violating the site’s code of conduct. But lucky for you I don’t care what random strangers on the internet think about me.
No, it’s how I see you based on pretty much any time I observe you making a public comment. Which is unfair of me, admittedly, I can’t possibly see everything you write. Most of the time, though, you come across as hostile, and read as though you’re dunking on other people and projects.
Anyway, the article was updated somewhat to give proper credit for your recent developments and point to your fundraising efforts.
Have a nice day.
Go back to reddit
The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn’t happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.
This doesn’t mean this isn’t a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it’s simply not the show stopper you paint to be.
So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.
Lmao do you think of yourself as a professional?
Not at all.
I think it’s a dead lock. The replies show that they can’t even understand the concern.
That’s a typical death to a project. For, there will never be a moment for the team to address the concern. Whatever you try, the team won’t move an inch.
I don’t know what instance admins are thinking, but there’s no point complaining at this point.
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?
This isn’t “one user” being “so demanding”. Its a trend. Read what others have said. Learn from your mistakes. Your community of instance admins are pissed because you’re constantly throwing them under the bus. And, yes, your moderation tools are crap. Thats objective.
And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
This is your brain on consumerism.
What do you want for nothing, your money back?
2000€ is rent for a 1 bedroom apartment lol.
Also this is not reddit. If you don’t like something, you can change it yourself. That’s how open source works.
Real “don’t talk to the help” energy coming off you, man.
Also big
vibes lol. Telling others to stop being ungrateful and disrespectful, while being ungrateful and disrespectful themselves.
Yea takes an impressive level of self awareness to go from “you work for us” to “no you don’t deserve more money” to “why arent you personally catering to me more” in that amount of time
You mean to all if the instance admins
Fuck off lol you do it then if it’s such a trivial task.
“Ungrateful” yea they should be super grateful for making a little over 10 bucks an hour to listen to this kind of self important bullshit.
Do you pay their salary and have an employment contract with the developers of Lemmy? If not, they do not work for you.
This is not a typical open source side project. The developers work full time on it, it’s basically their job. That 2000 Euros is their monthly gross salary. Average monthly salary in France is 2340 euros net as of 2022. The developers of Lemmy are earning well below average.
I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.
My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.
It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?
Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.
Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.
I think it’s a question of philosophy. If I take donations for something, is it really still my hobby projects I build in my free time?
Not really IMO. The moment I make money off it, it’s more than that.
And if I have a community of people who use that project, I should be transparent with them and engage with them. Maybe the Lemmy devs are doing this in some place where I’m not (like on their matrix), but I have never seen them explain why they are working on certain features and not on others. Their development updates are awesome and I appreciate them, but it’s very much a communication of “we are doing this, see you next time”. The recent AMA was a good example of engagement that gives the possibility to explain things better and get into contact. My advice would be to work on communication and feedback channels.
But everyone is free to see that differently.
delirious_owl is a troll people stop feeding it.
Micheal Douglass breakfast sandwich-ass
Fam, this is Free Software. Capitalism is that way → www.reddit.com .
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Its funny because there is no one in the world who signed any sort of development contract with us. All the money we have ever received for Lemmy have been donations which means there is no obligation for us to do anything. This includes money from NLnet which provided most of our income for the past years. And I bet the people complaining so loudly no have never even made any donation.
Well, yeah…
If you upload a picture to Lemmy, it’s going to get saved by a shit of federated instances.
That’s how federation works, but once it happens, it’s hard to get all of them to delete it.
The fix is easy:
Upload somewhere else (theres a bunch of images hosts) then make your post point to that image host. Federated instances just have to host the link, so it’s good for them too.
I’d love to see something like the RES feature where Lemmy can still show an expandable thumbnail for non-hosted images. RES pulled it off fine years ago, not sure how hard it would be.
But that would fix all these issues
So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn’t actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.
I agree that with federation, it’s a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.
The biggest issue I have is that there’s really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.
I have to say, I think the article actually does address what you’re saying, in particular here:
I also just want to point out that the knife cuts both ways. Yes, it’s impossible to guarantee nodes you’re federating with aren’t just ignoring remote delete requests. But, there is a benefit to acting in good faith that I think is easy to infer from the CSAM material example the article presents.
Those images are still cached as well as the thumbnails.
Couldn’t images and videos just be loaded from the instance they were uploaded to instead of getting copied to each instance? It would work almost the same as uploading it to a file hoster but it would be a lot easier usability wise and illegal content would still only have to be deleted at a single point.
This is what i was gonna say
Yeah it’s like trying to delete a torrent that you created lol, deleting stuff from the Internet is not so easy. Even websites that claim to allow you to delete stuff may still be backed up by The Wayback Machine or similar, or even just a random user who liked your post and downloaded it.
I would like improvements here, but you should probably still be careful about anything you post if you’re worried about being able to delete it, no matter what site you’re on.
I’m not sure I see the issue here, what’s the point of an open ecosystem if you don’t make use of any third party tools? Fedi-safety in particular feels like it should not be part of the core project
There’s nothing wrong with having good third-party tools, that was not my point. db0 in particular has done some amazing, amazing work.
What’s fucked, however, is having a project:
Like, this is not an attack on Lemmy itself, I think the platform can be a real force for good in the Fediverse. But let’s be honest, this project is not going to live very long if nothing changes.
Basic things like having the ability to easily remove images from storage should be part of the core platform. The fact that this still isn’t a thing even four years into the project is insane.
Its simply not true that we have zero consideration for privacy or user safety. But that is only one aspect of Lemmy, we also have to work on many other things. And we werent silent during the CSAM wave, but most of it was handled by admins and all the related issues are long resolved. Lemmy has 50k active users, its obvious that we are too busy to work on every single thing that some individual user demands.
There is a reason that Lemmy still has version 0.x. If you have such high demands then you shouldnt use it, and switch to another platform instead. And yes you are clearly stoking an attack against Lemmy, I wonder why you hate our project so much.
Look, no one is ungrateful for the work you and Dessalines are doing. I get it - I helped run a large-scale federated open source social network over a decade ago. It’s an amazing, incredible experience - but, it’s also grueling, demanding work, and community members and users can be incredibly fickle. Especially when it comes to living off of donations, and having to carve out a technical stack all by yourself. That shit is hard.
Here’s the thing: your users, your community, your efforts in general, pretty much ride or die by the people who run instances of your software, advocate for your platform, and develop apps and tools for your ecosystem. If something is broken at a foundational level, it’s ultimately your responsibility to decide what to do about it.
Code is not the only fruit of someone’s labor here. Your community is doing a lot of labor for you too, and making even less money doing so. At some point, if people don’t think their needs are being met to keep running their communities and stave off the worst of the worst, it’s going to tank people’s confidence. People will leave. And they’ll talk on the way out. Optics matter.
I’m not saying you have to drop everything to accommodate some random concern right away. But some of the responses you’ve given to people that had reasonable asks, that had reasonable use-cases in ensuring smooth operations of instances in compliance of laws…some of your reactions are terrible.
If your default when someone asks you about GDPR compliant features is to scream at people, demand that they do the work for you, make excuses that you’re too busy, or belittle someone because you disagree with someone, you’re doing community management ass-backwards, and you’re burning away community goodwill every time you do it. It’s hostile and demoralizing, and people will come to resent you for it.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Someone asks for something, points out problematic behavior, gives feedback on how something could be better, and you lean into the myopic belief that this is somehow an attack or an effort to undermine you. My brother in Christ, if there is any ill-will towards how you do things, it is because of your own behavior, not on the merits of your project, your political alignment, or who you are as a person.
I don’t hate your project, but you need to pull your head out of your ass, and realize that you’re dropping the fucking ball on trust and safety. People hosting instances aren’t going to stick around forever if you keep defaulting to hostility.
There is a stark difference between closing an issue and actually resolving the problem. You’re right; lots of those issues are closed. The identified problems remain and don’t go away merely because you close an software repo issue on it.
The first time some random user files a sue in court the admins of their instance will be in trouble.
Lemmy devs are not affected, but instance admins are and according to the GDPR they are considered “data controllers” and are responsible for the processing of users’ data.
As far as I understand it, this lacking feature is an open “challenge” to existing regulation and legislators, maybe also to open people’s eyes about the fact that privacy claims are often not enforced even by those who claim to do so.
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Just going to leave this here. Pretty sure this user knows about the fediverse quite a bit more than you’re assuming.
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.
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Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, tentatively Bonfire, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Akkoma. Off the top of my head.
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Hubzilla and the zot protocol are a really promising alternative to ActivityPub, just not as much traction.
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.
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There’s no guarantee on third party tools continuing to work with Lemmy. Something as critical as deleting images, which can cause problems like revenge porn and such, must be given priority by the official project.
We will never block third party tools, and will always have an open API.
One of the PRs I’ve been working on, is an interface to view your image uploads and delete them. This is not trivial, but will probably be in the next release.
Thank you for your service
Lemmy providing an open API does not mean that third parties maintain compatibility forever. (Edit: for example, what happens if the third party app gets taken away by a malicious maintainer? Or becomes buggy, or un-maintainable, project dies, etc.)
I don’t want to upset you, but I think I have to say this for the sake of the community. The attitude like “we provide an API, so third parties will follow,” is what is causing instance admins’ distrust in the first place.
I see what you did there…
Top tip: don’t take nude photos of yourself. Ever.
Even though i don’t do it i think people should’ve a right to do what they want with their body without fearing what others think or will do.
That’s what I said! But noooooooooo. They insisted on arresting me.
IT’S A PUBIC PARK! it’s right there in the name!!!
Because of this, I never upload directly an image to Lemmy and others, using instead a sharing tool (FileCoffee, IMHO the best). With my account there I can easily delete the hosted image with which it disappear everywhere.
It’s not a bad thought, but the way some Fediverse software works, it can still get proxied and/or cached locally.
That is a general problem in the internet, not only in Lemmy, images andother content can be copied, this you can’t avoid, it would even be imposible if you could delete embedded images in Lemmy, someone could have copied and pasted it somewhere else. But by using an imagesharer where you later delete the image, you also eliminate your origin as the author, since it no longer appears in your contributions in Lemmy or other sites.
Moderation is obviously important, but what are the realities around deletion in a federated ecosystem?
I feel like the push around this and GDPR are similar to the DMs situation in mastodon, where you might feel like you’ve deleted your stuff but it’s actually very much out there still.
I’m sure there’s a middle ground where some amount of deletion occurs and it’s better than nothing. But as with the BlueSky bridge conversation, it seems to me having a frank conversation about the kind of system we’re dealing with here is just as important.
Yeah, I agree. I think the important thing is “was the local content scrubbed?” Because at least if that was done, the place of origin no longer has it.
Federated deletes will always be imperfect, but I’d rather have them than not have them.
What might actually be interesting would be if someone could figure out this type of content negotiation: deletes get federated, some servers miss it. Maybe there’s a way to get servers to check the cache and, if a corresponding origin value is no longer there, dump it?
Well I’m sure there are a number of nice ways of arranging federated delete, including your suggestion, but it seems to me that the issue is guaranteeing a delete across all federated servers where the diversity of software and the openness/opt-out-ness of federation basically ensure something somewhere will not respect a request out of either malice, ignorance or error.
Ultimately, it seems a weird thing to be creating and expecting fediverse platforms in the image of those designed with complete central control over all data and servers. Like we’re still struggling to break out of the mould.
Even if one platform makes a perfect arrangement for something like delete, so long as servers running that platform push to / federate with servers that run something else, where it’s ultimately impossible to tell what they’re running because it’s someone else’s server, there will be broken promises.
I’m interested to hear your response on this actually, because it increasingly seems to me like we haven’t got to terms yet with what decentralisation actually means and how libertarian some of its implications are once you care about these sorts of issues.
I suspect it gets to the point where for social activity some people may start realising that they actually want a centralised body they can hold to account.
And that feeling secure on a decentralised social media platform requires significant structural adjustments, like e2ee, allow-list federation, private spaces, where public spaces are left for more blog like and anonymous interactions.
Also, sorry, end rant.
No, you’re good, and we’re mostly on the same page! My general expectation is that your server tries its best, maybe there are still copies out there, but you shrug and say “eh, I wiped my stuff locally, good enough”.
But yeah, I agree that once something leaves your server in terms of the passage of data, there are no guarantees. And I do agree that significant structural changes are necessary and important for the network’s continued evolution!
Maybe encryption can help? Instances only copy the encrypted image, and only the original instance provides the encryption key to client apps. This way, the original instance can de-facto delete the image copies by simply refusing to issue the key.
It also means the content is “lost” from all instances if the original server goes down, which altogether with the need to cache the key to continue to provide the service basically means you’ve just implemented DRM on top of Fedi.
And that’s fine. If one instance has to be able to delete one revenge child porn from all the instances, it has to be what you call a DRM. Also, don’t cache the key because that’s exactly the opposite of what this is meant for.
tbh I just assume that despite GDPR or CCPA any images I put up are there forever, it’s not like the tech is that different in the fediverse from anywhere else. nowhere is going to be scrubbing their storage drive blocks on delete if it even can be deleted
I take it you’ve never run a community instance. The problem is, laws vary by jurisdiction, and can have a very real effect on how you run your server when shit hits the fan.
We recently ran a story about a guy building his own Fediverse community and platform, who just happened to be a bit naive about the network. He’s off in his corner, doing his own thing, people find his project and assume it’s some kind of weird scraper. After disinformation came out about it, someone remote-loaded child pornography to his server, for the purpose of filling a report with the police.
The guy is based on Germany. Local jurisdiction requires one year of prison time minimum. It matters.
Can you mention this in your article?
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I endorse the Lemmy developers banning this entitled fucking loser.
Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights.
We don’t have to agree on every point (or at all), but I’ve decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/
If your are going to act so entitled just because the devs get 2k euro a month (which is under the average income in france and germany) you should just go back to reddit
Just wow that is how they start it
They’re not wrong. On multiple occasions the devs have acted like assholes, this one as well. Especially the part where they initially didn’t think GDPR would apply because they aren’t a commercial entity (paraphrasing) is comically depressing.
Having said that, I won’t be cancelling my donations anytime soon. Assholes though they might be, I still want to pay back to the Lemmy community, and I can’t think of a better way than this.
Software engineer full-time ~70k/year, lemmy dev 24k/year. You should look into the mirror.
And it’s not that the devs won’t fix the issue but there are other issues with more priorities than this. Europe is not the only continent. So just like any other FOSS projects, wait for it or smash money if it’s really important or do it yourself.
Btw based on Nutomic’s comment, it’s fixed next release if you bother to look before making 2 articles back to back.
spoiler
Unfortunately there was some miscommunication in this issue and we failed to get to the root cause. In fact the Lemmy backend has an option to delete all content when an account is deleted. This used to be the default behaviour but was changed in 0.19 so you need to set a parameter delete_content. We failed to add a checkbox for this parameter to lemmy-ui.
However the checkbox is added now in #2385 and will be included in the next Lemmy release. Other frontends and clients may also need to adjust the delete_account api call.
…
It’s pretty fucked up you post your blogs, read people’s comments, and use those to write your next blog post.
Like, real fucked up …
Not sure I’m seeing what’s fucked up about this. It’s not like they’re using people’s comments as their own work. They link back to this thread. It just seems like a place where they can dump a bunch of their own thoughts related to a topic without posting it here since it’s not necessarily in line with this thread’s topic anymore. And I thought it was an interesting read and appreciated them posting it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude has a 4 year Lemmy account with 160 comments…
Supposedly some kids of developer, but from his last two blog posts he doesn’t seem to know much about how it works, and that last article he just rants about Lemmy admins, Devs, and users…
I dunno, I blocked them.
I’m a long-time contributor to the space, and have been here for over 15 years. I was on the Fediverse when it was literally one or two platforms, and I witnessed the whole thing grow and evolve. I’ve seen the entire thing take shape, and change with every subsequent wave of platform, user migration, and major pivot.
I also ran community management for one of the large-scale early projects here.
A huge motivating factor of mine has been to write about a nascent and evolving space that I’m passionate about, often because no one else has been writing about it. I grew my own publication, We Distribute, out of it, and it’s my responsibility to report on different aspects of what happens in the space. Sometimes, the news is ugly.
My personal blog at my domain is unrelated to that, and is more just random brain droppings based on whenever I feel like putting out personal thoughts based on my experiences. There’s nothing malicious about that.
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