How will Lemmy handle illegal content like drug dealing, child porn, snuff movies etc? On Reddit, the corporation is accountable so they will make an effort to ensure non of this exists on their platform. And they would face legal troubles if they failed to act.
But as Lemmy is decentralised this isn’t really possible. Sure the main instances can defederate from bad instances, but those instances could still operate and be accessible on the web. Especially if they’re hosted in countries outside of the western sphere of influence. Multiple bad instances could federate and duplicate the illegal content pretty easily, making it difficult for the authorities to keep it shut down. Has this been thought about already?
The creators of Lemmy keep telling us about the “federation” of the social network. A federation is something that has a federal center that exercises a governing function.
Just because we all have not been informed of the existence of such a center does not mean that it does not exist.
Don’t look up for illegal content? Then you won’t get to see it. #unpoplaropinion
There was a discussion a few weeks ago where the NSFW instance made it a rule that illegal material would not be removed.
There was then a clarification that if the material was obviously illegal it would be removed but if it was questionable it would be allowed to stay.
This makes everyone that allows NSFW material to show up on their feed open to seeing illegal content.
OP’s question is a valid concern.
Each Fediverse instance is just a server running software (I.e. Lemmy, Kbin) that uses the ActivityPub protocol to communicate with other instances.
There is no central authority, that’s kinda the whole point of being federated and decentralised. Each instance is it’s own website, it’s own island. It’d be like asking how “Email” or “Https” would handle illegal content. It doesn’t, it’s up to the hosts themselves to do so.
On a fundemental level, each instance is just a website, so an illegal instance would be tracked down and prosecuted in the same way as any other website/forum doing illegal stuff.
Best you can do is encourage your instance’s admin to defederate from those illegal instances if they haven’t already. Let the authorities handle the rest.
With Mastodon, there are blocklists that make it fairly easy for moderators to block instances that post illegal content (or anything else, for that matter). I imagine something similar could be done with Lemmy.
Who will the blocklist affect? mods don’t control what’s being posted on another instance and if there are instances where that’s commonplace they’ll just post there
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I’m not sure I understand your question! Lemmy is FOSS, so anyone can set up an instance, invite users and put stuff on there. But, if everyone else defederates from that instance, it won’t show up anywhere except for that instance. So the illegal content on that hypothetical Lemmy instance isn’t the responsibility of anyone except the owner of that instance. It’s not the fault of the Lemmy designers any more than it’s Microsoft’s fault if I put something illegal on my Windows PC.
It’s like they host those sites on a apache server.
Lemmy is just the subjacent software that runs an instance.
Authorities would track the illegal content the same way they do on any other website I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Also descentralized illegal content exist since P2P protocols exist. I don’t see anything new with lemmy.
