What are the risks associated with this? With image uploading capabilities and the like I'm thinking there might be an issue with people posting highly illegal content. I used to run some smaller forums 15 years ago and that went fine, but it feels like the risks are higher today... I'm both thinking about one's own personal mental health in needing to moderate such content, and also whether it'll be a legal liability to run an instance if people post illegal content.

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[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 month ago (32 children)

Federation means any content posted to any federated instance gets cached on your side and you become a hoster of it.

This includes if someone posts or creates an instance for child porn and starts spamming it. You're possibly liable. and then have to deal with reviewing and cleaning it up to cover your ass.

[–] Shide@lemm.ee 24 points 1 month ago (23 children)

I'd love to support the fediverse but this sounds like a huge hassle and a problem. Maybe it's just me though, I'm glad that there are others that have decided to host instances.

[–] jjagaimo@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

There are some ways to mitigate the majority of that kind of stuff: You can disable image hosting, defederate from instances with poor moderation or poor attitudes, filter out certain keywords, use cleanup tools like from dbzero. Not sure if the caching still occurs if you disable pictrs hosting tho

[–] Shide@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Is there a way to choose which instances you want to include, instead of which ones you want to exclude? So the default is that no instances except the ones you explicitly allow, federate with you? Or is this against the spirit of the fediverse?

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

By default a fresh new instance will federate with no other instances period.
Instances only "learn" about the existence of an outside instance or community after a user enters a community+instance address in the search bar. After that, the home instance will sync with the remote instance and begin getting all new push data from that point on.

I don't know if Lemmy allows "whitelisting" of synced instances, such that it will auto synchronize with a provided list and ignore all others even if users search for them. I feel like it does, but I am not familiar enough with the backend to say yay or nay.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

Yes that is afaik possible via https://fediseer.com/

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 1 month ago

Yes, it is possible.

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