For background, this post on db zero provides background on what is going on.
Lemmy.world had to shutdown a community and temporary restrict signups, other instances have purged image caches, and dbzer0 is using a scanner to prevent images from being uploaded if the get flagged.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Just a note: The images themselves don’t get federated, just the links to them. So the content is only on the instance it originates from. This at least makes the issue slightly better as hosting the images would be far worse.
Theoretically they can actually be federated when encoded as
data:URI, but thankfully there’s a limit of 10k characters which is basically nothing when you want to put image into it.Example:
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I haven’t looked into the code yet but, I was given the understanding that Lemmy also implements a local pull-through cache for images in order to try to improve performance. So, if a user on our instance came upon CSAM or other illegal images while browsing through SDF, a local copy may be cached.