Update 1: This is an issue with cloudflare, we are having issues with the account that hosts the site, we are contacting cloudflare support about the issue.
Update 2: we have switched s3 providers and images should be working again, older images may be missing, we will have to do a merge with the old s3 storage backup into the new provider, we plan to do this soon, but all new images will work as expected, sorry for the issues and thanks for your patience and kindness while we were working on the fix
Update 3: we have created a new ticket with cloudflare support with more information so that hopefully they take this issue more seriously.
For those experiencing issues uploading pictures, that is a separate issue we were not aware of until yesterday, that should be fixed now
EDIT: Federation issues:
It seems like federation is working now and the issues with photo uploading and admin settings getting 500 errors was also causing federation issues. Some posts were, to my understanding, in a federation window that has passed so the data is no longer there to be federated to our instance but future posts should federate properly. Please let me know if you see any other more recent posts that aren’t federating properly.
Oh, the original malicious intent is evidently on the devs part. They perpetrated this shit and tried to hide it under a stupid “think of the children” blanket.
The lemmynsfw admins did keep this malicious setting on, though, without telling their users, and are persisting on keeping it on despite evidence that it's been causing their instance to be unusable for days (to the point that I very much doubt it'll ever recover).
Hanlon's razor might have applied when this started happening. Maybe they just didn't know they had turned this shit on.
Them persisting on keeping it on when it's clearly harming the instance, though, is making it look more and more likely to be a combination of incompetence and maliciousness instead of just ignorance (and, let's be fair, also incompetence).
And, obviously, their insistence on keeping it on has irrevocably destroyed any trust the users could place on them, which for an instance based on trust (people are supposed to post their own extremely personal pictures here, after all) doesn't bode well at all for the future of the instance.
Call me a rat if you will, but my first instinct is to flee the sinking ship (already made a backup account elsewhere a few weeks ago when it kept randomly crashing) and warn everyone to do the same.