1y ago

Legal concerns with self-hosting

I've been considering self-hosting for over a year now, but I'm still concerned if the feds will come knocking at my door for something someone else does.

For example, if someone on my server follows an individual or community and they posts something illegal (i.e. unauthorized sexually exploitive images) that content could be stored on my server. Wouldn't' I be legally liable for such?

I mean #fucklaws and everything, but I don't want to end up in a cage and certainly not for something someone else did.

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37 comments

Related, What about a personal instance only I use? I can choose what communities I want but I can't control what is posted on those communities. Someone could post something illegal to a beehaw community (and have) and the mods remove it, but does the deletion of images and posts federate? In know matrix keeps copies of every deleted file in a room on all homeservers, what about lemmy?
- If you do not download said asset you should be fine. As long as it is not CP
  
  Lemmy sometimes caches remote content in pict-rs. It's a bit broken so you usually don't see it, but it does do it occasional
  
  IIRC Lemmy preloads all thumbnails for posts in communities you subscribe to into pictrs to be cached for like a month or something. So, yeah...
  
  https://lemmy.gwa.app/comment/16763 Relevant. It's not only thumbnails currently
  
  Yeah, all I know is that I am definitely seeing images loaded in from domains other than that of my instance as I load/scroll pages, which I want to be loaded via my instance for privacy reasons.
  
  It barely works on my old version of lemmy, probably fixed now then. It would be nice if there was a was to turn that off and only use pictrs only for locally uploaded images. Since I'm the only person here caching isn't too important.
  I wonder if I could shut pictrs down and only use an external image hosting for images?
  
  I believe the Pictrs is a hard dependency and Lemmy just won't work without it, and there is no way to disable the caching. You can move all of the actual images to object storage as of v0.4.0 of Pictrs if that helps.
  Other fediverse servers like Mastodon actually (can be configured to) proxy all remote media (for both privacy and caching reasons), so I imagine Lemmy will move that way and probably depend even more on Pictrs.
  
  I believe the Pictrs is a hard dependency and Lemmy just won’t work without it, and there is no way to disable the caching
  I'll have to double check this but I'm almost certain pictrs isn't a hard dependency. Saw either the author or one of the contributors mention a few days ago that pictrs could be discarded by editing the config.hjson to remove the pictrs block. Was playing around with deploying a test instance a few days ago and found it to be true, at least prior to finalizing the server setup. I didn't spin up the pictrs container at all, so I know that it will at least start and let me configure the server.
  The one thing I'm not sure of however is if any caching data is written to the container layer in lieu of being sent to pictrs, as I didn't get that far (yet). I haven't seen any mention that the backend even does local storage, so I'm assuming that no caching is taking place when pictrs is dot being used.
  Edit: Clarifications
  
  It seems to work, but it keeps throwing pictrs related errors, so it's not really built for it
  
  Well that's disappointing. I'll have to investigate further I guess. I was really hoping to set it up (at least initially) without any type of media storage.
  
  Might be liable, then. You can never explain technology to a bureaucrat.

37 comments