Federation still causes those images to be saved on your hardware, even if the account that creates it is hosted somewhere else.
It’s serious flaw of federation #19865438736 that’ll go ignored even when innocent instance admins end up getting jailed over it
This is kinda a major problem with lemmy, and the idea that they don’t have CSAM detection on the roadmap is going to make wide adoption a near impossibility. The other thing though is that even automated CSAM detection isn’t 100%, so hosting your own instance likely means you’re going to have to view CSAM and other fucked up shit at some point to properly moderate it, even if you’re just hosting for yourself. Tbh I was strongly considering hosting my own instance because it’s not like, that hard/expensive, but this saga has turned me completely off of that idea, even just for myself.
This actually makes me wonder how much reddit mods deal with this type of thing instead of paid employees like facebook, which has a paid army dealing with content moderation on facebook. Oh, and talking about xitter now which has neither volunteer mods and no moderation team since Elon fired them all, I assume that the freaks have just decided that’s their hosting platform of choice.
I’ll be honest, I’m probably just going to do a scheduled wipe of the pictrs directory of my local instance every week or whatever. I’ve done them manually a few times and they’ve had zero affect on my experience.
If your local instance is just you, and you never post on your local instance, you could likely just wipe the local images nightly without any issue. Unless I am mistaken, any missing images would simply be downloaded again, since they all originated from another instance.
