Risks of running a Lemmy/Mbin instance?
Risks of running a Lemmy/Mbin instance?
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.
Federation means any content posted to any federated instance gets cached on your side and you become a hoster of it.
This includes if someone posts or creates an instance for child porn and starts spamming it. You're possibly liable. and then have to deal with reviewing and cleaning it up to cover your ass.
I'd love to support the fediverse but this sounds like a huge hassle and a problem. Maybe it's just me though, I'm glad that there are others that have decided to host instances.
There are some ways to mitigate the majority of that kind of stuff: You can disable image hosting, defederate from instances with poor moderation or poor attitudes, filter out certain keywords, use cleanup tools like from dbzero. Not sure if the caching still occurs if you disable pictrs hosting tho
That depends very heavily on your jurisdiction.