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Risks of running a Lemmy/Mbin instance? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What are the risks associated with this? With image uploading capabilities and the like I'm thinking there might be an issue with people posting highly illegal content. I used to run some smaller forums 15 years ago and that went fine, but it feels like the risks are higher today... I'm both thinking about one's own personal mental health in needing to moderate such content, and also whether it'll be a legal liability to run an instance if people post illegal content.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Images are definitely uploaded to Lemmy instances.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's uploaded to one instance and other instances are linking to that one for the picture.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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 :-)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah those are the thumbnails I think?

Ok I guess I better go look myself...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Very very large ones ;-)

Some are but the originals are definitely there too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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.