I was recently thinking about how amazing it is that with this decentralized community we would have no censorship from big corporations and then I asked myself: what about illegal content? The kind of content that really should not be shared? As an example, what if someone creates a Lemmy instance and starts creating a community around CP? Or human trafficking? How do we deal with it? I know that instances can choose with whom they can access the content, so if most popular instances blacklist that “illegal” instance its content wouldn’t be easily visible, but it would still be in the Fediverse. Also, will all popular instances have to be quick to blacklist these “illegal” instances? Isn’t that a little to difficult? If we go the other way, where they create a whitelist, wouldn’t that harm small legit instances? Is there a plan to fight off illegal content?
Fortunately images and thumbnails uploaded by remote users are hosted on the remote instance, not yours.
You should focus on making sure that your instance’s communities stay within the legality of your country, as well as flag and deal with any illegal behavior by your users.
For anything remote you have two options:
Block the whole instance (not recommended unless it’s clear that the whole instance is dedicated to something that’s illegal in your country or if they host something incredibly disturbing)
Click on “Remove” on the main page of a remote community. This will remove the remote community and make it inaccessible to local users but keep you federated to their instance.
You cannot control what other servers do. There will be servers out there hosting illegal stuff. But that’s not something you or I need to fix, that’s where law enforcement needs to be involved. The only thing you can do is block. If it’s something serious like CP or human traficking, grab any logs you might have from them, report to authorities, purge content from database and block instance.
Dear /kbin admins and users:
True for Lemmy, false for /kbin. Example meme post from lemmy.ml - the image has been fetched and is present on kbin.social’s database.
True for Lemmy. False for kbin and Mastodon which create local copies.
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