PSA: Be careful not to leave your Lemmy instances unmoderated

A while back I signed up to rammy.site a small lemmy instance run by a single person. It was a very nice instance, very stable and had pretty good access to other instances, or at least it used to. Recently though all of that has changed when the instance was taken over by far right-wing users from the right-wing instance known as exploding-heads, an instance which has been blocked by many others for the hateful content they post and the abusive behavior of its members. The reason that this was even allowed to happen was that the admin stopped moderating the server but left the server online, this is a problem because it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them.

There isn't much you can do to prevent going innactive but there are ways to mitigate what happened on rammy.site to prevent a full blown catastrophe like what has happened here. If you run a server and you are going to be going away for a while I'd recommend turning off account registration and community creation on your instance, that wouldn't prevent federated users and existing users from spamming existing communities but it would help against users joining the site and creating new communities which is what happened here on rammy.

I understand that it's not always possible to always be there to moderate your instance but you can at lease take steps to ensure that in your absence the instance won't be utterly decimated and/or used as a weapon to spread hatred or attack other instances.

28 comments

"it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them."

The best and worst thing about the Fediverse
- Admins of instances have a "purge user" button (or is that only for communities?) where you can basically defederate a single user or community.
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  There is also a "purge community" button. But I have learned that if I purge a non-local community the purge is so complete that your instamce forgets it ever existed... And it can simply be fetched again!
I admin a small instance as well and I have only blocked lemmynsfw.com at this point. I like to keep the server open to all unless a rule is broken on my server. This means even if I don’t agree with what is be said, again, as long as it is within the rules of the site.

It baffles me as to why you would go through the trouble of creating an instance and just leave it to rot with no oversight.
- Because moderating can be a full time job. If you go for a vacation, have a family emergency, etc and aren't actively looking at your instance, then it's "left to rot".
  
  If it's possible, doing the steps OP mentioned before going on leave will help the server avoid getting into a mess while you're gone.
  
  Kinda dislike this about selling stuff on Ebay, you've got to be always available to dispatch an item. They've got a "on vacation" mode, but if you forget to switch that on and someone orders something, you're SOL
  
  Why not just find someone to babysit the instance for you while you're gone?
- Why did you block lemmynsfw? Any questionable content? Or just you wanted to avoid any kind of porn?
  
  Don't want to deal with possible issues related to the cached images being stored on the server.
- I can think of many reasons, you might die, you might suddenly go to jail, you might suddenly have to take care of loved ones, your computer might breakand no money for a new one, the possibilities are endless!
  
  Of course. I’m sure we’ll see more of abandoned instances. Of course it could also be the admin doesn’t care either.
- I can totally see myself setting up an instance as a fun weekend project, letting people use it, then coming back a month later and finding a nazi hellhole. when you're doing something for fun/free it's easy to not take the boring and time consuming parts seriously.
Why would someone just leave a server like that running? Kind of a waste of resource they are paying for.

Also this sounds like a problem that will solve itself over time, since that server will not see any updates in the future. So it will be open to attacks or may stop working at some point when the version differences get too big.

Honestly, isn't it rather stupid to build a community with extreme views on a server you are not controlling? Eventually they are going to lose that.
- Permanently Deleted
  
  Ok, question then since I haven't seen it this way.
  
  So these dudes are on server x, but post crap in a community on server y, if I got you correct? Server x is known to host problematic content. If other servers now decide to defederate with server x, as the source of that group of people, will they still see posts of them on server y? If yes, then the only solution is for server y to defederate, which I guess is what you are writing about.
  
  If this is true, should this not be addressed upstream in Lemmy? I wonder why if you defederate from a whole server you would still want to see their comments on other servers they are connected to. But maybe thats not possible?
  
  Yup it's a proxy to circumvent defederation, they're just posting shit there because at least when they started it was federated with many others. They'll probably just flee elsewhere but this is why it's very important to make sure you have people to manage the instance in case you aren't able to anymore.
In my case I run instance for myself and only inviting people I trust or they gave me good reason for join :)
Yeah, that's why I have my instance requiring you to request an account rather than just automatically making them.

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