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] 6 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Legality also totally subjective, it's a big gray area for sure

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

Yeah, I totally understand that. As a personal example: I'm against its civil usage of firearms, if someone is using the Fediverse to sell them, who am I to say that that is illegal? It might be illegal where I live, but maybe it is legal where they live, we can't really be judges on these kind of topics. I used the term "illegal" because I couldn't find a better term to describe those kind of subjects that (hopefully) 99.99% of people would totally NOT be okay with it showing up on their homepage, like the two examples I provided. What is the plan for that?

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

I think we're all hoping it will sort itself out. The gun example isn't that great but let's use CP or trafficking as you first mentioned. All the sites that have such things on the internet today (and they unfortunately do exist) have been driven underground to avoid being policed. The same should theoretically happen in the fediverse.

If someone was going to create a CP focused Lemmy, they're technically able to do so as the software is open source, and they're technically able to federate it with other servers, and it could technically show up if you filter by all. However I think this is very unlikely because it would bring attention to that instance and hopefully a response from law enforcement. You don't want to run an underground operation in the light.

So the plan is report anything you stumble upon and historically that should work well enough to push it out of public view. Now if you're talking about stopping these unfortunate crimes, that's a different story all together and no one has a solution.

[–] JoshNautes 1 points 1 year ago

I guess your answer made me a little less nervous about this. It would make sense that an illegal instance would not federate itself. Thank you kind stranger. There is just one more thing that I'm curious about. You said "report anything", when I click the "report" button on a post, to who is that report being sent? The admin of the instance that the content is hosted or the admin of the instance I am hosted?

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