Due to some disgusting behaviour, I've kicked off the process of deleting ALL images uploaded in the last day.
You will likely see broken images etc on aussie.zone for posts/comments during this period of time.
Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for an instance. I'd rather nuke all images ever than to host such content.
That CSAM exists is horrible.
That people would maliciously spread it as some sort of prank puts an extra disgusting veneer on this whole thing.
I hope at least some of these "it's just a prank bro!" people get caught by the police and get shown just how funny society finds them.
I fully support what you are doing but I'm not sure I completely get it. If the attack was against a community on another instance, why do you have to wipe images on this instance? Are images posted on all federated instances stored on the Aussie.zone server?
It seems that lemmy.world has decided to move to application based sign ups - which may slow some people down, but from a mod perspective the only options available are bans of custom length, removing comments/posts and locking posts
Sadly this isn't new, its been known about for quite some time. Slightly irresponsible for that person to post and make a big noise about it without creating a github issue though. Ideally the lemmy devs will add code to automatically purge orphaned images. Hopefully this public noise around it will hurry this up.
I see this much like the extraneous data being stored in the database previously; low hanging fruit for devs to optimise and make hosting an instance less resource intensive. Yes there are possible legal risks for uploads that are not referenced on lemmy, but the reality is this could happen deep in a comment thread or a user profile anyway.