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

submitted 6 days ago by Shide@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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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[-] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] Shide@lemm.ee 23 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 21 points 6 days ago

I never thought I'd be a registered CSAM reporter with the feds, but then I decided to host public content via Lemmy. Turns out, while 99.9% of users are great or fine, that 0.1% are just assholes for the sake of being assholes

[-] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 6 days ago

Hmm, this is something I haven't heard about. Can you actually register as an instance hoster with the FBI or equivalent to say "hey I have a service that may be exposed to CSAM, I do not condone this and will report any cases of it that I see"? If so that could reduce a lot of people's specific legal fears of hosting.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 points 6 days ago

Not with the FBI, but with the national center for missing and exploited children, who collate reports and work with the FBI. Cloudflare and others have services that route all images through their detection systems and will auto block and report CSAM. I didn't want to use cloudflare, but turns out if somehow I did accidentally host it, I would be charged with hosting it. I have to report it or I'm the responsible party

[-] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

That's good to know. I've had some half baked plans to host a public instance for a while (will probably get to it in winter) and honestly the legal risk has been something that's really held me back. Knowing I have a way to cover my ass for removing it is great.