Comment on we need more users
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day agoAdmin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn’t always true.
As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it’ll never get to Reddit sized levels.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
That’s not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn’t financial.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But if it doesn’t, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn’t federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.
This would be extremely important, but I don’t know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.
Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.
No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: lemmy.ca/post/45390962
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
Sure, you’re right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.
Well it would be built in from Lemmy or Piefed. The devs would have to spearhead it. But were the load ever to get to that point, I suspect that would be the obvious move.
Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Depends… Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That’s not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn’t be such an easy choice either.
But it’s not only CSAM. For example, there’s illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.
Actually, if you are a non US citizen and you and you want to travel to the USA, it’s already troublesome if you are hosting a website with anti-Trump content.
That kind of stuff is unlikely to be deleted on the original instance if that instance isn’t hosted in the same country.
Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
I don’t think that would save it, to be honest.
People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.
I suspect eventually lemmy/piefed federation will not be automatic, but subject to approval.
No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As “Lemmy” or “Piefed”, as you know, are not singular entities.
Yeah, in part because they had a “no defederation” policy which came to bite them back.