this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Feddit UK
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I tend to agree that blocking some political subs etc is perhaps not the best, since every user on the instance will suffer, but please take a skim-read of the banned Beehaw instances - you will find something you do not want on here. Tom as a server owner also will have a vested interest in blocking some of this content that passes through his infrastructure.
Because the content is actually hosted on the server, I definitely think there's a legal and moral cause to block some of these.
Sure, let Lemmygrad in, that's fine, but a lot of those links are staying unclicked for me and I'd probably want my server clean of it.
From my cursory inspection of how things are working, all the the content is replicated between instances but things like images are just links, the UI and the back-end provide a means to upload an image but what that is doing is uploading an image to the user's instance and then putting the link in the post. Pretty standard stuff for a link aggregator. The important thing here is that the image itself is not replicated around the fediverse, but stays where it was uploaded and is linked to. Of course, thumbnails seem to still be locally generated as you'd expect.
So the legal issue is diminished by that, but not illuminated. Something like loli hentai that is illegal in the UK won't be hosted on these servers even if posted on a federated server, though I'm not saying it wouldn't be reasonable to defederate from that instance on other grounds than legal liability. However the thumbnail is a very low resolution image of illegal content, and I don't think lemmy has some kind of "grey list" where content is still available through your instance but nothing of consequence gets replicated locally, thumbnails not generated, etc. I'm not sure what the legal situation is surrounding outlinks to illegal content not thumbnails thereof. Furthermore I don't know what kind of protections platforms have when it come to liability for user-generated content, like the US Section 230, but I don't think there is much.
It might be better to host the actual servers for this instance outside of the UK as a result, that could very well be the case anyway.
Anyway IANAL and I've only done some cursory poking around into how lemmy handles the replication of content between instances so there are almost certainly things I'm overlooking.
But other lemmy's content isn't copied into @tom's servers, is it?
Oh, actually, yeah stuff I've subscribed to from beehaw, for example, is appearing on my feed on feddit.uk, so at least the post title and other headers that appear directly in my feed must have been synced to the feddit.uk server to generate the list of posts.
After that anything that I read by clicking, like the full text of the post, can be hosted on its original instance and my web browser could fetch it when I click.
Lemmygrad are fine as long as they don't start brigading my Northern Ireland community.