12
  • Instance: feral.bond
  • Type: Defederation
  • Affects: Pawb.Social, furry.engineer, pawb.fun
  • Reason: Zoophilia, Pedophilia (pedophilic commentary), underage users

For obvious reasons, no evidence will be provided.

Determination was made by reviewing text posts from users on the remote instance which were deemed sufficient to justify the defederation reason and action.

14

We’ll be performing maintenance on all services at 6 PM US Mountain Time. We’re needing to migrate our Docker data-root storage directory to a new disk array as we’re approaching the limit of the current drive. We expect the maintenance to take no longer than 1 hour.

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 6 points 2 months ago

Yes! We've got one up at https://matrix.pawb.social/ via web, or pawb.social via apps. You should be able to sign in using your Lemmy (pawb.social), furry.engineer, or pawb.fun account :3

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 10 points 6 months ago

We haven’t yet got the images reimported so existing images and profile pictures will still be broken. The base URL without the format link would have been cached most likely, but the format link would error as pict-rs isn’t aware of the file you’re trying to reference.

For now, reuploading things like profile pictures is my recommendation rather than waiting for us to get the images reimported.

We did discuss briefly with Asonix but they weren’t sure it’d be possible, so we’re exploring options using an external database for pict-rs but that seems relatively new.

tl;dr we have the files, but are still working on getting them reimported!

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 11 points 6 months ago

ℹ️ Thanks to the efforts of one of our moderators, @southernwolf@pawb.social, we've been able to recover some of the lost data from pawb.social that was still active in Cloudflare's regional caches.

Currently, this is about 25% of all of the known uploaded media files stored on pawb.social.

We'll be reviewing the final tally of recovered data in the morning and trying to work on getting what we can reimported into Pict-rs.

46
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social

EDIT, Update: We've been able to partially recover about 25% of the media uploaded to Pawb.Social.


Upon further investigation, data from pawb.social was priorly moved to the new server and was inadvertently deleted as part of the earlier incident affecting furry.engineer and pawb.fun's cache while we were preparing the new server.

furry.engineer and pawb.fun media is unaffected, but all media directly uploaded to pawb.social is unrecoverable and has been lost. A miscommunication on my part OK'd the removal without fully checking the scope of data that was being removed; This was intended to only remove test data we were using to stress test the new hardware, but affected live data as well.

A large majority of posts are externally hosted and referenced (e.g. images from media.kbin.earth, d.furaffinity.net, etc.) are NOT affected. Only posts directly uploaded via the Create Post > Image field on pawb.social are affected.

We had previously transferred pawb.social to the new hardware as a preliminary trial and I had forgot this occurred thus failing to bring it up prior to the deletion going through.

I'm looking into options to be able to in-place reupload media on behalf of posters, but as the UUIDs are randomly generated by Pict-rs (the media service used by Lemmy), I'm unsure how to facilitate this. Any advice or information would be appreciated, and can be sent to network@pawb.social.

I understand this is a serious incident and reflects poorly on us, and I can only apologize for this loss and work to prevent this happening again in the future.

EDIT: I believe this will also impact profile pictures and community images (logos and banners), so please re-upload them at your earliest convenience.___

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 10 points 9 months 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.

30
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social

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

11
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/communityrequest@pawb.social

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 Request for Comment (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.
8

Hey Everyone!

If you've noticed any performance issues (or hopefully performance improvements!) across any Pawb.Social service, please let us know here.

That includes: pawb.social (Lemmy), furry.engineer (Mastodon), and pawb.fun (Mastodon).

Ideally, if you could provide the following information when reporting a performance issue, it would be greatly appreciated:

  • What you were trying to do at the time? (Loading the homepage, opening a post on c/..., making a post on c/..., etc.)

  • What browser / app were you using?

  • About how long did it take for the action to complete?

Feel free to include anything else you might think is relevant, and we appreciate the community's assistance!

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 8 points 11 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.

53

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.

3
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/AITA@pawb.social

Welcome to Pawb.Social's c/AITA!

While furry-themed, this is a general purpose Am I The Asshole community intended to help posters see their situations from another perspective and grow.

How to Post
  • Ensure your title starts with "AITA" and explains (concisely) what happened (e.g. "AITA for downing all the punch?")
  • Describe the situation as objectively as you can, ensuring you anonymize other participants in the situation
  • Include how the other participants are upset with you or believe you to be the asshole (as much as you're aware)
  • Include why you believe you might be the asshole at the end of your post
  • Try to keep posts reasonably concise. Only provide backstory information where it's absolutely necessary and cannot be summarized.
FAQs
Voting Guide / Terminology
  • 🟢 NTA – Not The Asshole
  • 🟡 ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
  • 🔴 YTA – You’re The Asshole
  • 🔵 NAH – No Assholes Here
  • 🟣 NMI - Need More Information
[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 7 points 1 year 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).

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 7 points 1 year 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.

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 15 points 1 year 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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social

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 network@pawb.social 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 network@pawb.social.


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

27
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social

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.

33
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by crashdoom@pawb.social to c/pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social

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:

10

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.

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 7 points 2 years ago

Aware and investigating!

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 7 points 2 years ago

Status update

Both instances are back online again! We're currently transferring cached media from remote instances to the local storage, so avatars, emojis, and older attachments may currently appear as broken images.

As of Feb 7th at 10:45 PM Mountain Time, pawb.fun has re-generated all feeds, while furry.engineer is continuing with an estimated 25 minutes to go. We're also re-generating the ElasticSearch indicies which power the full-text search system and expect that to continue through the night.

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 10 points 2 years ago

Didn't even think to do that! Added to the sidebar :3

[-] crashdoom@pawb.social 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.

view more: next ›

crashdoom

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