[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

To clarify, e621's additional rules on the DNP page, like the no "content that is not furry or furry-related" under "Avoid posting these things" do not apply. Non-furry posts are still permitted and encouraged as much as furry posts!

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

That would be linking, and we'd ask you also include the source in the text description of the post. Direct uploads to Pawb.Social are the only things affected by the rule change.

29
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Rule 9 is rescinded until further notice.

We're holding off on implementing this rule while we re-evaluate with the feedback we've received thus far. Thank you for your feedback and patience.


⚖️ We appreciate the feedback we've received so far regarding the DNP rule, and will be holding off on implementing it while we re-evaluate the use of the e621 list and instead look at maintaining our own list.

Upon re-evaluation, the differences between e621 as an image board and Pawb.Social as a social aggregator site don't quite line up in the same manner and the vast list provided by e621 is both cumbersome and not representative of those wanting to allow sharing via social aggregation sites but not via imageboards out of their control.

This started to lead towards needing to maintain awareness of the e621 list and potentially an exceptions list that would overall make the moderation a complete headache.

Once we've squared away the details, we'll be looking to announce the rule prior to it taking effect to ensure we strike the right balance.

I'm sorry we didn't get this right and the approach seemed so hamfisted, and I'll strive to ensure better communication on these changes in the future.

-Crashdoom, Pawb.Social Network Owner


Original Post Begins Below

In Short: Effective today, Friday, July 18th, 2025, Pawb.Social will be adopting e621.net's Avoid Posting List in a new Code of Conduct rule aimed to respect artist's wishes not to upload their content elsewhere.

EDIT: To clarify, e621's additional rules on the DNP page, like the no "content that is not furry or furry-related" under "Avoid posting these things" do not apply. Non-furry posts are still permitted and encouraged as much as furry posts!


Artists own their content and have a right to determine when and where their content is redistributed. That being said, trying to collate that information is time consuming and leads to a lot of duplicated effort already achieved elsewhere (such as e621's DNP list).

Going forwards, we're introducing a new Code of Conduct rule to address these issues:

Rule 9. DNP (Do Not Post) Content

Our DNP content policies apply to images, videos, and other file-based content uploaded directly to any Pawb.Social service, but does not include content linked externally.

DNP (Do Not Post) content rules falls into one of two categories: Static DNP, and Artist DNP.

Rule 9.1. Static DNP

Static DNP content is content that shouldn't be uploaded to Pawb.Social services, such as content that can realistically be expected to be private and not publicly shared, or content that breaks any other rule in the CoC; This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Any commercial content (e.g. content behind a paywall or similar access control, inc. Patreon and similar)
    • Similar to e621.net, Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) content that you can obtain for free may not be uploaded until at least 2 weeks (14 days) have passed. This allows for artists to still obtain revenue and traffic directly from PWYW content.
    • Additionally, when uploading PWYW content past this 2 week period, we require a link to the source to be provided in the description (or a top-level comment).
  • Content of a harassing, abusive, or discriminatory nature, or otherwise depicting hate, abuse, or discrimination through text, symbols, or other iconography.

Rule 9.2. Artist DNP

Artist DNP content is anything produced by an artist listed on e621.net's Avoid Posting List that you do not have explicit permission to repost.

Linking to content by DNP artists on other websites where the artist themselves (or an authorized person) is the poster is permitted, but direct uploads are not.

Rule 9.3. Exceptions

If you have permission to upload something that is covered by the DNP rules 9.1 or 9.2, please include proof in the description of your post, otherwise it may be treated as DNP content and removed upon being flagged for review.

Rule 9.4. Reporting / Moderation

As content is not automatically reviewed and there's no tag system similar to e621 on Lemmy, we cannot effectively auto-moderate content that may be affected by the DNP nor do we have the resources to manually review every post, so we encourage users to report content that they find on the DNP list for the community Moderators / Admin Team to review.

If you believe you've uploaded content that falls under one of these categories, we ask that you either delete the post directly or report it for a Moderator / Admin to action for you. Reports from the uploader will not receive a warning or further moderation action.

However, repeated posting of Artist DNP (Rule 9.2) content without permission may result in a warning, or further moderation action, especially if it has already been brought to the user's attention.

Rule 9.5. Direct Takedown

Rule 9 and it's sub-sections do not remove the statutory right for an artist, character owner, or commissioner to submit a takedown / DMCA request directly to the Pawb.Social Admin Team.

Content requested to be removed via a takedown / DMCA request can be submitted to network[at]pawb.social with the subject line: "Takedown Request: [name]", and include the URL(s) of the offending posts, and the reason / information relating to your ownership or right to request removal.

We'll work with those submitting takedown requests to verify their authenticity, and once confirmed we'll notify affected user(s) about the takedown request we received via DM / email, and remove the offending post(s).


We hope that still permitting links to externally hosted content where a DNP exists allows discovery of that artwork and artist, while respecting their wishes to ensure it's not directly reposted without permission, and ensuring minimal disruption to communities and users on Pawb.Social services.

We'll be giving a grace period of 14 days from this announcement before any moderation actions above a warning will be issued to allow for public comment and feedback.

Posts created prior to this announcement will not be subject to moderation action except removal of offending posts upon them being identified.


We would also like to welcome and encourage feedback on this policy change in the comments here, and in our /c/meta community in general.

-Crashdoom, Pawb.Social Network Owner

2
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

If you want to create a NEW community, you do not have to make a post here, just click Create Community in the header! This process is only for claiming dead / abandoned communities hosted on Pawb.Social.


Rules

  • All requests must be titled "Requesting c/" then the community name (the short name, e.g. "furry_irl", "meta", not the display name).
  • Please include a brief reason for why you want the community, and what you plan to do with it.
  • Comments posted must comply with Pawb.Social's Code of Conduct, or may be removed.
  • Off-topic posts will be removed and may result in a ban from c/communityrequest.
    • For meta discussions, please use c/meta.

Eligibility

  • To request a community, it must have no active moderators. A community has active moderators if any mod account has recent activity within the last 90 days.
  • You can only request communities that exist on Pawb.Social. We cannot action requests to moderate remote communities.
  • You can only request one community at a time, and may not request more than one (1) community every thirty (30) days.
  • You must have had an account for at least thirty (30) days prior to making a request.
  • You must not have had any administrative actions taken against your account within the last ninety (90) days.
    • Remote users requesting communities on Pawb.Social will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and we may reach out to your instance's Admin team during the process.

Request Process

  1. After a request is submitted, it will be reviewed for compliance with the eligibility requirements by a Pawb.Social Admin.
  2. If initially approved, a seven (7) day RFC period will begin to allow other users to comment and provide feedback on your request.
  3. The Pawb.Social Admin Team will review comments at the end of the RFC period and determine if your request will be granted.
[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago
Update, Apr 27, 2025

We've updated Lemmy UI to a hotfix version of 0.19.11 that re-enables the NSFW field on the Create Post form for NSFW communities. This should once again allow users to correctly mark posts explicitly with the NSFW tag.

While a permanent fix is in development by the Lemmy team, please ensure you check this NSFW toggle if you're posting to a NSFW community.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

52
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We’ve been made aware that it is no longer possible to identify posts as NSFW in a NSFW community as of Lemmy 0.19.11 (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2887), and as a result some posts appear to be not marked as NSFW.

While some apps (Voyager is the only one I have personally verified) do correctly flag the posts in NSFW communities as NSFW by default.

We’ve verified on 0.19.11 Lemmy will blur the image and not tag the post as NSFW, but we haven’t verified behavior from older instances viewing our communities / posts.

Due to the current time as of writing this, I’m not able to investigate further until the morning but I hope this provides some basic information on the situation for now.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

😂 We've given it a stern talking to and helped it recover through a restart, and image uploads appear to be working as normal again!

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Honestly, like you said, I genuinely have no idea what the US will do; Currently things are being so shaken up that anything is plausible right now.

For outside the US, I don't really know what reach other countries have. The UK's Online Safety Act is the current one I'm watching for since that would require "highly effective age assurance" which... if the folks writing the law had been online like, ever, they'll have realized is an utterly stupid statement unless they plan to enforce integrating ID Verification via a Credit Agency (Experian, Equifax) which does personal question-based verification (which imo is a huge breach of user privacy since while WE might not know who you are still, the credit agency does and where you signed up).

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Yes, several US states along with other nations have been considering porn ban laws, along with the rather blatant anti-LGBTQ stance of the currently elected US party.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

In the works! We're planning to have some info very soon, though we're still building out an improvement for the NAS to allow us to expand the storage capacity for long term, high size file storage specifically for Pixelfed!

[-] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I have to admit, I spent a while trying to workshop how to make it sound less ominous and I'm really sorry I failed in that; Definitely something for me to work on in the future, and I apologize for it coming across rather legal and scary.

61
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

This notice is also being sent by email to all users with a verified email on Pawb Social services. (Completed as of 02/13/2025)

UPDATE (02/13/2025)

ℹ️ If you received the "Important - Pawb.Social is re-structuring as an LLC!" email from us about an account you don't recognize, or no longer wish to have, on our services and would like the account deleted:

Please email [email protected] from the SAME email address, and we'll be able to lookup your accounts and remove them.

If your account has any content, we will issue a backup to the email on file and wait 7 days before deleting the account, unless you ask us to delete it immediately after we inform you that content exists.


Begin Original Post

As of Friday, February 14th, we will be transitioning the management and ownership of our instances to PawbSocial LLC, a new limited liability company (LLC) registered in the State of Colorado.

This change is primarily driven by the desire to ensure legal protection and mitigate liability concerns in light of the current political climate, but has been a task we would have eventually needed to face as Pawb Social grows.


What does this mean?

There will be no changes to the team running any of our instances, and PawbSocial LLC will continue to be owned and operated by Crashdoom.

Donations will now be made to PawbSocial LLC, though there should be no changes necessary to existing donations. PayPal donations via Ko-fi going forward (one-time or recurring) will show PawbSocial LLC instead of "Pawb.Social".

Existing assets and hardware bought for Pawb.Social using donations will be transferred to PawbSocial LLC's ownership.

Our contact information remains the same: You can contact the Network Admin team by email at [email protected].


We felt it important to inform all of our users of this change despite there being no change in leadership or effective ownership as a show of good faith and transparency.

We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we take these steps to ensure the long-term stability and security of our community.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.


Crashdoom

Owner / Network Admin, PawbSocial LLC

26
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Firstly, the maintenance for Pawb.Social services has been completed and we've upgraded Lemmy to 0.19.6-beta.13, and our Mastodon instances to v4.3.0.

Thanks for your patience.


and now, onto the "Toastify is awesome" (because it is. Totally.) postmortem:

Short summary: Crash did a stupid with the config and emails weren’t getting sent (oops). Emails should now be working again, and registration shouldn't require admin intervention.

Longer story:

Lemmy has several configuration options that need to be updated to correspond to the specific instance that's running it. For example, here's a snippet of Pawb.Social's config:

{
  database: {
    host: "the.best.db.url.internal"
    user: "pawbsocial_lemmy"
    database: "pawbsocial_lemmy"
    password: "pawbsocial_do_you_really_think_i_would_leak_this"
    pool_size: 128
  }
  hostname: "pawb.social"
  pictrs: {
    url: "http://pawb-social-pictrs:8080/"
    api_key: "sekrit"
  }
  email: {
    smtp_server: "email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:587"
    smtp_login: "pls_send_emails"
    smtp_password: "jeff_im_begging_you"
    smtp_from_address: "Pawb.Social Lemmy <{{domain}}>"
    tls_type: "starttls"
  }
}

Can you spot the problem? (No, it's not my awful password, or the pleading I'm doing with AWS to send emails so y'all stop having email problems.)

Originally, Lemmy was deployed through docker-compose which uses variable replacement to change something like {{domain}} to pawb.social automatically. Crash swapped away from using docker-compose due to repeated issues with trying to deploy the Lemmy changes and opted for a more bare Docker configuration.

Can you guess what didn’t get changed? …Yeah, the {{domain}} part was never removed and replaced with pawb.social so Lemmy correctly caught the error and threw an exception. The unfortunate part is that the thrown exception caused the whole comment process to close the connection to the web proxy server which returned a 502 Bad Gateway, which gave the UI HTML instead of a JSON response. The response handler in the UI then tried to figure out what was wrong, failed to translate the HTML to JSON, and gave the default error message “Toastify is awesome!” (which it is. Objectively.)

HOPEFULLY. This does fix the issue. I can’t guarantee it, but I’ve been able to replicate it by replying to someone else’s comment (which usually triggers an email notification) and after making the change, it successfully sent off the comment with a happy green confirmation toast.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Thank you for doing your part, and thank you for the cute sticker!! :3

[-] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

If anyone has been struggling to get a verification email:

  • Please ensure you check your spam folder (We’ve been having some mail delivery issues with AWS)
  • Send an email to [email protected] using the same email you created your account with, and include your username, and we’ll manually approve it in the database

We’re working to figure out what’s going on but it seems to be a mix of issues

8
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We've successfully upgraded Lemmy from v0.19.3 to v0.19.5 and have a bunch of changes to share!

Bug Fixes

  • Previously users were reporting that the web client kept logging them out. This was suspected to be due to a misconfiguration of the cookie storing the session information and should be fixed.

  • Some communities were slow to load. Federation changes in v0.19.4 and v0.19.5 should rectify some federation issues. Additionally, we increased the number of database connections for Lemmy and will gradually increase this if we identify any further slowdowns.

(Longer term, we're planning to upgrade the database hardware which should improve the performance for all services)

Local Only Communities

When creating or editing your communities, you'll now see a "Visibility" option that allows you to choose between "Public" and "Local Only".

The "Public" setting will continue to operate as normal and federate your community to all other instances we federate with.

"Local Only" will disable federation for your community and restrict the community to being viewed by local logged in users only; Logged out users may not be able to see your community until they log in.

Image Proxying

Once we've established that the database is no longer under substantial load and the performance issues previously experienced are fixed, we'll be enabling an image proxying mode which will allow us to locally cache images from remote instances rather than serving them directly.

This will allow us to improve the performance of loading images without applying additional load to other instances, and prevent remote bad actors from trying to scrape IP addresses.

Other changes

There are a handful of other miscellaneous changes that you can view in the full change logs:

1
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We’re aware of an issue affecting our Lemmy service (pawb.social) that seems to be causing users to be randomly logged out. We believe we’ve identified the issue thanks to a bug fix in a newer version of the UI code.

We’re needing to verify there are no other breaking changes for the upgrade process, and expect to perform maintenance this Sunday, Sept 22nd at Noon US Mountain Time (https://everytimezone.com/s/7abd4955). We’ll provide an update tomorrow to confirm the maintenance window.

Thank you to everyone who brought this to our attention and we apologize for the inconvenience.

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

tl;dr summary furry.engineer and pawb.fun will be down for several hours this evening (5 PM Mountain Time onward) as we migrate data from the cloud to local storage. We'll post updates via our announcements channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.


In order to reduce costs and expand our storage pool, we'll be migrating data from our existing Cloudflare R2 buckets to local replicated network storage, and from Proxmox-based LXC containers to Kubernetes pods.

Currently, according to Mastodon, we're using about 1 TB of media storage, but according to Cloudflare, we're using near 6 TB. This appears to be due to Cloudflare R2's implementation of the underlying S3 protocol that Mastodon uses for cloud-based media storage, which is preventing Mastodon from properly cleaning up no longer used files.

As part of the move, we'll be creating / using new Docker-based images for Glitch-SOC (the fork of Mastodon we use) and hooking that up to a dedicated set of database nodes and replicated storage through Longhorn. This should allow us to seamlessly move the instances from one Kubernetes node to another for performing routine hardware and system maintenance without taking the instances offline.

We're planning to roll out the changes in several stages:

  1. Taking furry.engineer and pawb.fun down for maintenance to prevent additional media being created.

  2. Initiating a transfer from R2 to the new local replicated network storage for locally generated user content first, then remote media. (This will happen in parallel to the other stages, so some media may be unavailable until the transfer fully completes).

  3. Exporting and re-importing the databases from their LXC containers to the new dedicated database servers.

  4. Creating and deploying the new Kubernetes pods, and bringing one of the two instances back online, pointing at the new database and storage.

  5. Monitoring for any media-related issues, and bringing the second instance back online.

We'll be beginning the maintenance window at 5 PM Mountain Time (4 PM Pacific Time) and have no ETA at this time. We'll provide updates through our existing Telegram announcements channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

During this maintenance window, furry.engineer and pawb.fun will be unavailable until the maintenance concluded. Our Lemmy instance at pawb.social will remain online, though you may experience longer than normal load times due to high network traffic.


Finally and most importantly, I want to thank those who have been donating through our Ko-Fi page as this has allowed us to build up a small war chest to make this transfer possible through both new hardware and the inevitable data export fees we'll face bringing content down from Cloudflare R2.

Going forward, we're looking into providing additional fediverse services (such as Pixelfed) and extending our data retention length to allow us to maintain more content for longer, but none of this would be possible if it weren't for your generous donations.

1
Lemmy v0.19.3 (pawb.social)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We've updated to Lemmy v0.19.3!

For a full change log, see the updates below:

Major changes

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy’s sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don’t get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don’t have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

1
Test post (pawb.social)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

owo

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Currently, we’re running the Ubiquiti Dream Machine directly as the modem via PPPoE, but there appears to be an intermittent issue with the software implementation that results in periodic downtimes of a few minutes while it reconnects.

We’re looking at switching this back out with the ISP provided router in pass through mode to negate the PPPoE connectivity drop.

We don’t expect this to take longer than 1 hour to switch over and test for reliability before bringing the services back up.

We’ll be performing this maintenance around 11 AM US Mountain Time, and will provide updates via the Telegram channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

One of the data storage systems (CEPH) encountered a critical failure when Proxmox lost connection to several of its nodes, ultimately resulting in the CEPH configuration being cleared by the Proxmox cluster consensus mechanism. No data, except ElasticSearch, was stored on CEPH.

When the connection was lost to the other nodes, a split-brain occurred (when nodes disagree on which changes are authoritative and which should be dropped). As we tried to recluster all of the nodes, a resolution occured that resulted in the ceph.conf file being wiped and the data on CEPH being unrecoverable.

Thankfully, we’ve suffered no significant data loss, with the exception of having to rebuild the Mastodon ElasticSearch indexes from 6 AM this morning to present.

I’d like to profusely apologize for the inconvenience, but we felt it necessary at the time to offline all services as part of our disaster recovery plan to ensure no damage occurred to the containers while we investigated.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

We're using the Ansible playbook deployment, and I ended up giving the pictrs service a restart through docker (docker restart <id> and you can get the id by using docker ps).

It didn't seem to be out of space or even offline, it just locked up and stopped responding to both new uploads and existing image requests.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Okay, please, can we actually? xD

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crashdoom

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