Lemmy's Image Problem
wedistribute.org
The 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.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • Die4Ever@programming.dev
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • Fisch@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.