It is time to talk about sailing ship and encourage defederation of this instance, I think.
Update: Administrator action has been taken, thankfully.
It is time to talk about sailing ship and encourage defederation of this instance, I think.
Update: Administrator action has been taken, thankfully.
I think this is an extreme reaction to (as far as I’m aware) the first instance of a serious issue with the sdf lemmy instance.
Another poster has brought up that the admins are possibly busy with taking over another pubnix system at the moment. That’s quite a big project.
Lemmy is still a niche thing, run by a small group of volunteers. It is not anywhere close to reddit or other sites in terms of resiliency against admin life events. As far as I’m aware, Lemmy is not a primary thing for the sdf group, but instead just one of many projects amd servers they run. As a sysadmin, these things tend to be cattle more than pets.
Also, I hate to say it, but a single user posting hateful shit is not a true emergency. Even if it has been 48 hours. From a purely sysadmin perspective, it would need to be heinously illegal content being posted or an actual infrastructure failure to reach emergency level in my eyes at least.
Unless I’m missing something, the sysadmins have been reached out to through their admin accounts on this lemmy instance, and the membership@ email address. There has also (according to this thread) been one single person who posted in the IRC asking for an emergency method to contact the admins, and that only happened after this thread was posted.
Has anyone tried contact through the instance mastodon account? Looks like there was activity there a few hours ago.
Has anyone checked the whois records for the webmaster email listed and tried that?
All of that said, this does highlight a major issue on this instance that needs resolution: there needs to be enough active lemmy instance admins that an issue like this cannot sit with no acknowledgement for anywhere even close to 48 hours, and it should probably be someone separate from the sysadmin(s) since they seem to have a schedule busy with other things.
There also needs to be a clear list of contacts, contact methods, and escalation chain procedures.
Until then, 48 hours is not some absurd amount of time with no response for a place as small as the sdf lemmy instance. Hell, at least in the east coast US right now there is a nasty nasty Flu variant going around that is laying some people out for well over a week. I’ve heard of some people still having symptoms 3 weeks in. Not covid, just the fucking flu.
I’m not trying to say that the asshole isn’t a problem, just that in the context I think that calling for defederation after 48 hours with no ack is silly.
We have used both Mastodon and the BBS to reach out as well. I will be back at my PC tonight and can do much more like using the internal chat on the pubunix box.
Editing to add: It isn’t just this one incident. They have been doing the sysadmin side of things, but not doing the community admin side of things. The last we saw of the admin account was 1.6 years ago.