this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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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.
I don't think it's as bad as you think. If someone uploads illegal content to any service, they remove it of course. Same thing on Lemmy.
Original images and videos are not spread across instances, they stay on the instance they were uploaded on. However, thumbnails are distributed.
Images are definitely uploaded to Lemmy instances.
It's uploaded to one instance and other instances are linking to that one for the picture.
It's pretty easy to check and see that this isn't how it works. I checked both my instance and yours and both of them host the images that have been posted to communities on other instances, so clearly images are transferred (or cached) between instances.
Ya, I have a gazillion images in pictrs on my server, the overwhelming parg is absolutely not from my instance.
Out of curiosy, what's your instances? Mine is lemmy.mindoki.com :-)
Yeah those are the thumbnails I think?
Ok I guess I better go look myself...
Very very large ones ;-)
Some are but the originals are definitely there too.
I ended up modifying the source code of my pyfedi instance to avoid this. It was mainly because the images were too large and (since my instance is for a single user - me) there wasn't a benefit to hosting it separately rather than pulling from the original source.