lemmy.world has recently been the target of CSAM attacks. In plain English, people have been deliberately posting child porn to the lemmyshitpost community on lemmy.world.

Relevant posts on the topic:

Through federation this affects everyone, including us. There are a few things that are problematic in the way Lemmy works:

  • Pictures are cached (stored) locally by each instance, even if they were posted on another instance originally.
  • When a post is removed by a mod, it’s not actually permanently deleted from the server.

This means that even if community mods respond and delete this content, without further action this content will carry on being stored on our server.

I’ve done my best to purge all of this shit as soon as I became aware of it. Other than continuing to do so, there aren’t many other ways I can respond to this.

I have a couple of asks from you:

  • Please report anything that you suspect may be CSAM. The same goes for scat, gore, etc.
  • Please let me know if you learn of anything similar happening again, to make sure I don’t miss it.

That’s it for now, hopefully this is a blip and not a trend.