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Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not
by Sanzig 11mo ago
Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.
- joecool1029 11mo agoIt’s terrible. I had to leave most channels on the matrix.org namespace because they won’t properly moderate their own server from CSAM. I dropped to 7 day media retention to lower legal liability on my own server, since there’s no way to know when one of my users will be in a channel hit with abuse. At this point the majority use case I have for matrix is to bridge to IRC with heisenbridge and be able to use signal on my laptop through mautrix-signal and nheko. The number of native channels I’m in continues to shrink.
- indolering 11mo agoHave they done anything to mitigate this? Like client side filters or message scanning for new direct messages?
- Arathorn 11mo agoThe main things are https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ (for flexible serverside moderation) and the rest of the stuff in https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/. Clientside filters already existed, but given they only apply per client and there are a lot of different clients, we focused on serverside filtering.
- BrenBarn 11mo agoWhat are the plans to improve the moderation experience for room admins who do not run their own server (of any kind)?
- mystraline 11mo agoI know the matrix honeserver I use has taken our recommendations to NOT cache images from matrix.org due to their non-existent moderation. And the admin put out a bulletin to also recommend disable downloading images as well. There's also the split room bug (feature?) that allows banned users to still be in rooms where the honeserver doesnt ban them. And then, distributes connection shows ongoing banned content (primarily, you guessed it, CSAM) and the better-moderating admins can't do anything about it. I'm basically in a few well moderated rooms (Gnuradio, other topics). They do extraordinarily well in not getting many trolls, and for garbage collection. The only one we're seeing spammed is for some cryptocurrency site Liquid something. But its just commercial spam.
- teekert 11mo agoLet's not forget a team making a great free product. Yeah we can complain about filthy materials but imagine you working hard to build something as nice as Matrix/Element only for these low-lifes to do these horrible things to it. How annoying it must be to have to spend time battling such things.
- whatevaa 11mo agoIf you make anything public, you will have to deal with it. You should be mentally prepared for that from the start.
- johnisgood 11mo agoI mean I could just as easily say you as an user should be mentally prepared. Matrix is developing a privacy IM, you do not really moderate that now, do you? Leave the rooms that raise your cortisol level.
- jacquesm 11mo ago> I mean I could just as easily say you as an user should be mentally prepared. Users tend to be less aware of these things than the operators of such servers (or at least, that's how it should be). > Matrix is developing a privacy IM, you do not really moderate that now, do you? No, but you can create mechanisms for the users to flag problematic accounts. > Leave the rooms that raise your cortisol level. The filth will follow the users. That's the whole game plan here: to cause grief.
- johnisgood 11mo agoI have been in many rooms that are completely fine; technical rooms. As for flagging problematic accounts: how would that work in a decentralized E2EE system, and do you think it cannot be abused? What would you want them to do if I flag your account a million times? Keep in mind they probably may not be able to keep up with it, nor do I expect them to. Additionally, you still should be able to use the service due to its decentralized, privacy-preserving nature, so the worst thing that may happen is getting banned from a Matrix instance, or a room.
- BrenBarn 11mo agoIt's kind of wild to me that they haven't prioritized this more. This issue has been open for almost exactly 6 years: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/565 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/565 . This one even longer: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/836 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/836 . The Matrix permission system still doesn't even have a way to say "sending images is not allowed" (either per room or per user).
- tcfhgj 11mo agomaybe because of limited budget and more urgent issues? who knows
- chrisjj 11mo agoAnd what could be more urgent than this?
- tcfhgj 11mo agohaving a usable technical foundation, staying financially afloat
- Arathorn 11mo agobuilding a more flexible solution for blocking content, rather than hardcoded rules like "no images": https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/
- Teever 11mo agoIs there something fundamental to the matrix architecture and permissions system that makes it impossible or difficult to allow room/server operators the ability to limit certain users from posting multimedia content?
- tcfhgj 11mo agopolicy servers show that they indeed do care
- irusensei 11mo agoConsidering the thread context I'm curious how would IRC help with that other than people running command line or TUI clients? Also do you want the development team to moderate self hosted chat servers? How would that work?
- selfmodruntime 11mo agoI still can not blacklist homeservers by domain instead of ever changing IPs. Great stuff.