After a year online the free speech-focused instance ‘Burggit’ is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:
This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with. The software is downright frustrating to work with, and It feels less rewarding overall putting effort into this instance because it feels like we’re so isolated.
A few weeks later, in the post announcing that Burggit was shutting down, another admin says the same:
The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there’s no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can’t even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.
The other thing is there’s no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.
Also the software is constantly breaking.
They also say that Kbin has many of the same problems, so I’m just curious to know if the admins of bigger Lemmy & Kbin instances feel the same way about these software.
(instance admin here, but for a small one) woof well, for me, I agree, but I wouldn’t use that wording.
Lemmy for sure isn’t a plug and play site. Setting it up took leaps and bounds, learning way more about nginx than I ever really cared to, and figuring out documentation that was very clearly out of date. Very little logging or error messaging exists to help with that problem.
Very little errors exist at all, it’s very much a “happy path” project. That’s why we get constant spinners everywhere, because when an HTTP error occurs there’s no actual error message. (Come on guys, just add it to your standard HTTP messages, if statusCode < 200 || >= 300 then show a toast message).
But yeah, the moderation tools have to be the worst. Lemmy has an amazing development group that’s separate from the main developers who have patched together a good set of tools, from automods to CSAM and illegal scanning, huge props to them - but these issues are routinely ignored by the main devs. I was shocked, honestly shocked that when we were under CSAM attacks that there was not an immediate roundtable of the head devs to try to solve the problem officially. Here was a problem that 99% of countries would immediately and gladly throw us, the instance admins, in jail over and they just handwaved it away. In fact, I don’t know that there was ever an official post about it, or even that there are things coming to help with it.
I love Lemmy and being here, and the devs have done a great job at building this platform for us, but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.
Bugs and caches and that sort of thing I can overlook. Those I can wait on and see them get smoothed out over time. Actual issues that could land me in jail or get the feds to beat down my door? Those I kind of expect a fast response.
So, I’ll say I’m extremely conflicted. I want to host lemmy long term, and I’m happy to bring the fediverse to a few more people, but the csam attacks really altered my view of the devs.
Edit - because my favorite manager said “Bring me solutions, not problems” a few things that would really help immediately -
Dont forget the complete ignorance of gpdr. That shit will get you fucked over, and its not as simple to follow as it seems.
In fact, Im not 100% sure that federation works with gpdr, since you cant garantee all data will be deleted.
I’m not sure it’s that difficult to follow. If you offer a service in the EU, you are responsible for your server deleting personal data (or, even better, not even hosting it in the fist place!); you are not responsible for other people not deleting their copy of personal data.
But I’m not that well-informed in the actual legalese so my best understanding is the big issue is the EU’s definition of “provide service to the EU” more than anything else. They seem to think that just because your users might upload a local copy of a picture of someone from the EU, even if you yourself are not allowing connections from the EU, then you are serving to the EU. And with how nazi the EU has been going lately with stuff like ChatControl, the last thing I’d want as an instance owner is to be upheld to arbitrary boomers’ (lack of) understanding of technology.