I was recently thinking about how amazing it is that with this decentralized community we would have no censorship from big corporations and then I asked myself: what about illegal content? The kind of content that really should not be shared? As an example, what if someone creates a Lemmy instance and starts creating a community around CP? Or human trafficking? How do we deal with it? I know that instances can choose with whom they can access the content, so if most popular instances blacklist that “illegal” instance its content wouldn’t be easily visible, but it would still be in the Fediverse. Also, will all popular instances have to be quick to blacklist these “illegal” instances? Isn’t that a little to difficult? If we go the other way, where they create a whitelist, wouldn’t that harm small legit instances? Is there a plan to fight off illegal content?
I’m sorry if I’m asking dumb questions, I’m new to the Fediverse. As I understand we are talking as if I have my own instance. But what about "public’ instances like Lemmy.world? What if I’m scrolling through my Lemmy.world homepage and then that kind of content shows up?
What he’s saying is that Lemmy.world does not have to worry about the illegal content being stored on their server, and if you had your own instance the same would apply to you. It’s the instance hosting the content that is dubious.
The fediverse is open to all by default, and if you choose to set your homepage to list “all” then you open yourself up to “all”. As other have mentioned you should be reporting anything illegal too see so that the instance owner (or yourself if you self host) can block that content or defederate the offending instance and report to the authorities if needed.
You can’t have a safe space free from anything you oppose while also having pure freedom. There’s always a balance.
Is there an easy way to report an instance to admins so that it can be blacklisted? What about other instances? Is there an easy way to warn to all instances about it? And other Services like Mastodon or kbin? Would they all have to be warned individually? If there isn’t an easy way of doing this, shouldn’t it exist? A way for users to to report a piece of content to all instances so they can choose if they would block it or not?