I’m not really sure about that. I’m not saying it as an expert or anything, but that’s a discussion I saw around here the other day.
Basically, once you federate and copy the content to your instance, it is in your server and you are responsible for it.
I’ll agree with a few things, tho:
It barely happens today, on centralized platforms. They’re hardly obliged to remove content because some judge says so (it does happen, tho, at least in my country)
I’d imagine it would be a bit of a grey area legally, right now. We would need legislation regarding the fediverse. Imagine someone posts child porn in an instance yours is federated to. Your instance copies the content. You notice and defederated the whole instance, but don’t remove the content. The dude is banned by his home instance and his post is removed. But his copy still exists in yours, since you defederated before his ban and content removal.
Just saying that selfhosting brings a lot of things that need to come to your attention.
Does Lemmy automatically grab all content from all federated servers, or does it only grab the content from communities you (and any other users on the instance) are subscribed to/are actively being visited?
I’m not so sure it does copy all content in the background.
Yeah, it’s only communities that people on your instance search for/subscribe to afaik. So if you’re the only one on your instance then you have control over that.
Further to that it’s only the post objects (and comments, etc.) that is replicated all pics and videos are just URLs. even when you upload a picture with the post, that’s just uploaded to the instance and the link to it is the link of the post, even on other instances the images are fetched from the original source from the client side. I do believe each instance does local thumbnaling.
