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?
Cloudflare offers abuse imagery scanning which seems ideal for Lemmy. If you’re using them as a CDN already it’s something you can simply apply for.
Instances that don’t want to take any action against such content would likely be prosecuted eventually.
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.
There are far easier, more secure ways for people sharing, say, child porn to do so than hosting a Lemmy instance. The only real benefit of a Lemmy instance would be the ease of use.
A Lemmy instance is just a website, possibly running on someone’s basement server rack. There’s no way for any authority to stop them from hosting child porn on that server, unless that authority is (1). Their ISP or (2). The police.
Lemmy (or, rather, ActivityPub) is just an internet protocol, like Email. You can’t stop someone from hosting child porn on a Lemmy instance just like you can’t stop someone from sending child porn over email. This is not a reason that Lemmy should not exist in the same way it’s not a reason for secure, encrypted email to not exist. Enforcement falls to traditional, (supposedly) accountable authorities, which is much better than it falling to administrators of a private company.
“Lemmy” can’t handle anything. That’s by design.
“Lemmy” is really just a piece of software that people can use to run forums that will federate with other forums and so forth and so on. There is no central “Lemmy” authority that could do anything, and that’s by design, and a lot of the point. It means that there can never be a Lemmy spez or Musk or Zuckerberg, fucking things up for everyone.
The highest authorities are the individual instance owners, so it will fall on them to deal with illegal content as they see fit. Presumably they’ll generally work to keep it off of their own instances through active moderation, and they’ll block other instances that they have reason to believe do not maintain acceptable standards.
And like it or not, some share of responsibility will fall on individual users to manage their own activities in order to avoid problematic instances.
The trade-off for having no central authority that can fuck things up for everyone is that there’s no big mommy/daddy to watch over you and protect you. The fediverse is better suited for people who are okay with that.
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