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?
Im sure it would be easy to track on behalf of authorities, no more than downloading a large zip and uploading it elsewhere is. Authorities can notice the unique characteristics of files and find them across the web.
As for actually stopping this, right now a lot of instances federate with many instances, I’d be worried about bad actors fwderating with big instances and then posting illegal shit, meaning big instances download onto their servers by accident. More moderation tools need to be developed into fedi.
I’d say moderation is up to each instance, but it does leave the question if anyone is legally responsible for ensuring no instances have illegal content - I’d guess no. If it’s open source then the perpetrators will be solely responsible for illegal content on that instance, as they used the open source platform for nefarious purposes… I’m thinking individual instances have a legal obligation to keep that content blocked, but I’m not sure. I think this is a really good question
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.
The responsibility would fall on the instance admin(s). Moderators could also share the responsibility, as well as any users involved in the illegal activity.
My first guess would be filtering out illegal content is something that the operator/admins of the given instance have to take care according to the law of the country the server is hosted in.
This becomes a problem though when, like in my case at the moment I’m just me running my own instance. Even if other users join my instance, how many are going to want to moderate the content? Not many I’d bet. There is so much content coming in right now. As of right now I’ve received 405 new threads, 5652 new comments and information like avatars (which could also be explicit) from 6058 users.
How does one person moderate all of that? I’m not sure (not tested, but I doubt it) whether a moderator deleting a comment or a post on the owning instance is also sent to other instances federating. I think it should (and maybe have it configurable whether you honour them or not, but it should be on by default). That way the moderator team on the hosting instance is removing stuff. Sure on a per instance level reported content can also be deleted. But that should be the outlier.
