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] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Same with the Internet. There aren't any real open human trafficking or child porn sites online. Most hosting companies won't host them, most protection companies won't hold off ddos attacks and if they tried to do self hosting, their jurisdiction may blast down their doors and raid them. If somehow all of that doesn't happen, countries will block them anyway and if not that, then communities can defederate from them.

Stuff like Discord is more of a risk as it is bigger so less moderation resources and it's private

[–] JoshNautes 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah I thought about not having that kind of content on the internet. Well... there is but as you said it is either raided by the host (be it a company or a country) or we don't really have access to it because it does not show up on Google so we have no way of knowing it even exist unless we look for it. But, as my experience with Lemmy is that my homepage is filled with many posts from different instances that I never knew existed. What if an instance sharing "bad content" shows up on my homepage? What is the next step that I can take?

[–] Asafum 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I suppose you could report it to whatever the equivalent of the FBI is in your country if you aren't in the US and block the instance. Not sure what else we can do about other people's instances.

I think it should all exist and then face the consequences of their respective countries laws as people report them, the content will always exist in some form in some place so at least this way we leave things as open as possible while still dealing with illegal things "properly."

[–] JoshNautes 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait I can block instances from showing up on my Lemmy.world homepage without having to ask Lemmy.world to block it? Is this a Lemmy specific feature? Or is this a common Fediverse feature? Will this also block that instance from showing up on my search? As an example: If I search for the abbreviation of CyberPunk and the "illegal CP" shows up on my search, I can also block that instance from ever showing up on my search?

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

I'm new to all of this so I'm not 100% sure about other ways of accessing the fediverse, but I'm on the mobile app Jerboa and if I click on the three dots next to a post before opening the post there's an option to block instance or block the individual that made the post.