this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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General Discussion
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Not daring. Just saying Lemmy can absolutely accommodate you, but we're individuals, we are held personally liable for what is posted. If you want to post that sort of content you can, the beauty of the fediverse is that you or your group can easily spin up your own instance and say whatever you like. But then you are also personally responsible for that.
I used to be very open to privacy on mine until someone sent waves of spambots at it and then I had to lock it down. I wanted to allow people from tor and vpns but then I quickly realized I would be the one in trouble if anything was said. I just can't have that amount of risk, I just wanted to host a small community.
If you run a tor relay, and encrypt all traffic, and do not store data locally, and make sure not to do any other nefarious activity online. There are legal resources to help you. But yes, it is a very very very shitty experience if the alphabet agencies come knocking. Expect to be audited, and have your employer and family members interviewed.
https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-faq-tor-relay-operators
If you're not able or willing (completely understandable) to run a tor node consider donating to the EFF who will defend tor relay hosts.
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/
I actually read that exact one when I had just set it up. I came over during the big Reddit exodus and was so excited to set up my instance, just a small one with a few communities that I felt like I could handle. The downside is it's the whole of the fediverse, and I quickly had to defed from several instances and had to moderate way more than I'd like. It's honestly exhausting, and then the whole CSAM attacks happened, and then the spam attacks, and it's a lot for one guy.
I broke down during the first csam attacks, I saw some horrific shit. I luckily was in therapy and talked about it, but goddamn do they post the worst things out there. I never thought I'd have contacts with federal agencies as a reporter (in the US if you host a site you are a mandated reporter), but here we are. All because I just wanted to talk about pop music.
And then people wonder why I don't allow other material. I can barely handle the okayish material posted, let alone actual vile shit that comes my way, no one prepped me for that. I give kudos to others who do, the lemmy.world admins are way stronger than I am, but damn are there a lot of people out there who just want to ruin the little communities we have.
So, back to the OP, that's why I kneejerk reacted there. It's not nearly as fun hosting this as I thought it would be, and I've debated many times shutting it down, but I believe in the fediverse and open social media so I try to keep it up. It's constant spam fighting, trolling protection, and just a headache, and it's still never enough, users always demand it should be more open, but I just can't.
Absolutely understandable. One thing I would love to see are more robust moderation tools. I've been tooling around with the idea of pushing images to a RAM disk, running an anti CSAM/gore/NSFW trained AI against that cache and only then pushing that into another RAM disk that can then be reviewed.
I did a lot of work with other folk on collecting metadata of nazis on twitter and Facebook back in the day.
But to get to the more important matter. I really hope your mental health goals are being met and you're better now.
Humanity can contain such dark and evil spaces, and the Internet is just a megaphone for that.
Your first one actually exists, it's over here, by the guy who runs the db0 instance: https://github.com/db0/fedi-safety.
As for the second, thanks. People are the absolute worst, and a very minor few ruin things for the vast majority. It shattered all of my illusions about safe communities, there are people everywhere looking to shit on a good thing.
Thanks for that! This looks pretty close to what I was working on, I'll see if I can contribute.