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?

  • Rottcodd
    78•1 year ago

    “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.