Sorry for the short post, I’m not able to make it nice with full context at the moment, but I want to quickly get this announcement out to prevent confusion:
Unfortunately, people are uploading child sexual abuse images on some instances (apparently as a form of attack against Lemmy). I am taking some steps to prevent such content from making it onto lemm.ee servers. As one preventative measure, I am disabling all image uploads on lemm.ee until further notice - this is to ensure that lemm.ee can not be used as gateway to spread CSAM into the network.
It will not possible to upload any new avatars or banners while this limit is in effect.
I’m really sorry for the disruption, it’s a necessary trade-off for now until we figure out the way forward.
Guessing there’s no way to track down the uploaders?
I suppose many of them probably are posting behind VPN or Tor.
I’m no expert on this; but I’d assume that it is sometime easy to track them down, and sometimes very hard. Easy if they just do a direct upload from their home internet with a fixed IP address, using a regular lemmy account that they also use for day-to-day stuff. But hard if (for example), they use upload from some coffee shop wifi connection with a throw-away account using some tor / proxy / VPN shenanigans.
That would be a lot of work for admins, but perhaps reporting the CSAM to the FBI or something. I’m pretty ignorant about how that all works.