No Stupid Questions

"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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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.

Images aren't federated. You're viewing them from their host server.

So it's not really duplicated anywhere

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.