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.

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    27·
    9 days ago

    I’d just like to point out that most of the complaints referenced in this post are at least partially being addressed with the latest release of Lemmy, 0.19.4

    From the release announcement

    Image Proxying

    There is a new config option called image_mode which provides a way to proxy external image links through the local instance. This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.

    Instead if image_mode is set to ProxyAllImages, image urls are rewritten to be proxied through /api/v3/image_proxy. This can also improve performance and avoid overloading other websites. The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.

    Moderation enhancements

    With the URL blocklist admins can prevent users from linking to specific sites.

    Admins and mods can now view the report history and moderation history for a given post or comment.

    The functionality to resolve reports automatically when a post is removed was previously broken and is now fixed. Additionally, reports for already removed items are now ignored.

    The site.content_warning setting lets admins show a message to users before rendering any content. If it is active, nsfw posts can be viewed without login, after consenting.

    Mods and admins can now comment in locked posts.

    Mods and admins can also use external tools such as LemmyAutomod for more advanced cases.

    Media

    There is a new functionality for users to list all images they have previously uploaded, and delete them if desired. It also allows admins to view and delete images hosted on the local instance.

    When uploading a new avatar or banner, the old one is automatically deleted.

    Instance admins should also checkout lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner which can delete thumbnails for old posts, and free significant amounts of storage.

    As you can see, there were many improvements to the moderation tools and image hosting UX/storage requirements. There’s obviously still room for improvement, but everything else out there has glaring issues as well. Mbin/PieFed are even less polished than Lemmy at this stage, although they are progressing quickly.

    Also worth noting that most of the replies to the first post express a strong user preference for Lemmy over Sharkey.