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?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] JoshNautes 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sorry if I'm asking dumb questions, I'm new to the Fediverse. As I understand we are talking as if I have my own instance. But what about "public' instances like Lemmy.world? What if I'm scrolling through my Lemmy.world homepage and then that kind of content shows up?

[–] foggenbooty 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What he's saying is that Lemmy.world does not have to worry about the illegal content being stored on their server, and if you had your own instance the same would apply to you. It's the instance hosting the content that is dubious.

The fediverse is open to all by default, and if you choose to set your homepage to list "all" then you open yourself up to "all". As other have mentioned you should be reporting anything illegal too see so that the instance owner (or yourself if you self host) can block that content or defederate the offending instance and report to the authorities if needed.

You can't have a safe space free from anything you oppose while also having pure freedom. There's always a balance.

[–] JoshNautes 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is there an easy way to report an instance to admins so that it can be blacklisted? What about other instances? Is there an easy way to warn to all instances about it? And other Services like Mastodon or kbin? Would they all have to be warned individually? If there isn't an easy way of doing this, shouldn't it exist? A way for users to to report a piece of content to all instances so they can choose if they would block it or not?

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