Matrix's moderation problem really is embarrassing.
I am in the CalyxOS chatroom since I use CalyxOS and I go there to ask questions whenever shit inevitably breaks, not even a week after first joining someone (maybe a Daniel McCay orbiter) joined to spam loads of illegal shit. A mass exodus of users leaving out of disgust would inevitably follow. Now this is partly the fault of the group moderators who didn't do jack shit for like 20 whole minutes while we were busy trying to get police involved, but it also highlights a core issue with Matrix infrastructure that encourages the behavior.
From what some instance operators have told me, the reason this is so prominent on the Matrix fediverse is because attachments are downloaded and cached by the recipient server(s), meaning that flooding a chatroom with CP is a really effective way to get a server host you don't like raided by federal agents. And these guys usually don't get caught doing it because the abuse report contacts on their providers don't do shit and they constantly hop instances anyway.
On the other hand, every Jabber group chat I've seen takes moderation very seriously and the worst I've ever seen after using it for years is one group of skids trying - and failing - to DDoS random servers before fucking off to never be heard from again.
I'm not as familiar with how bad it is in public matrix rooms since I tend to stick to private ones, but even despite that I still end up occasionally getting invited to dms by spambots advertising dedicated cp rooms. As far as I'm aware, several of the official Matrix rooms have been targetted, in addition to other popular community rooms.
The way the media repo works is extremely retarded, however the miggers did manage to actually slightly improve it with
"Matrix 2.0" (marketing name for a glorified hotfix) where they slightly locked down the media repo so it doesn't act as an
unauthenticated media proxy anymore. Not sure as to how common weaponized cp is but I know of at least one instance where it's gotten a homeserver taken down temporarily.
The increase in cp spam is unsurprising given how many cp rooms there are. There are thousands of them, the vast majority of which are filled to the brim with miggers (matrix.org users). Given the scale of the problem and the amount of other retardation on matrix (furries, retarded leftists, autist-o-spergs, etc) I'm surprised there isn't a megathread.
Could post an anonymised & censored list of some of some known abusive rooms for context but I'm unsure if the KF jannies would be ok with that or not, even if most of them are named things that would be generic enough to find anyway. (many rooms literally just include 'cp' or similar in the title). A lot of them hover around the 1k-4k usercount.
Upper Echelon made a video that broadly summaries the problem. Skip to 4:33 if you already understand how federation works.
https://youtu.be/W8KEuAEYjQ4
It's because it's a pain in the ass to moderate at all, let alone actually delete media. You need a server admin, not a room admin, to run media purge commands on the machine, which up until recently were buggy and would leave random images on the disk. Go figure the trouble these retards have realized they can get people in because of this.
Room admins can remove the messages that link to the media, but not the media itself. Obviously, only server admins can remove media stored on the server. The reason removing "image messages" doesn't also automatically remove the media is because the media repo is seperate from the client-server api. A matrix client first uploads the media, and then links to it in the message they send into the room. This means you can take the media upload reference (mxc) and re-use it.
Ahhh thank you for making this thread. I've been toying with Matrix for almost half a year because everyone I know uses Discord and I have been losing my mind trying to escape from it. Honestly had never even considered XMPP because there just seemed to be so many resources for Matrix already
The catch is that despite Matrix having a fancy looking set of clients, moderation tools are essentially non-existant for room and server jannies. Basically all of the homeserver admins I know have resorted to using their own custom-written scripts. If you want to use Matrix: disable registeration and never federate. You should never make the mistake of hosting a publicly facing service for free.
