If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?
Looking to maybe self host my own instance, I'm still learning about the fediverse. If a different instance that I federate with hosts something illegal are there risks to me? Is anything from other instances hosted on my server like a copy of it? Or would I only end up hosting things my users post? I'm paranoid and sorry if this is a silly question.
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Federation is implemented by copying the content from other servers to your database and file system, so if your users subscribe to something from a different server it will be copied to your server.
But it will be only served to your users, not to the public. Only the communities hosted on your instance will be served to the public.
AFAIK only text is copied, media stays in the instance where the community is hosted.
It depends on the software. Some proxy all content from remote servers so you only connect to your home server (Mastodon). Others don't, instead they make clients load remote content themselves (Lemmy). If you use browser client you can see all the connections being made.
Yes, depends on the software, the post is about lemmy so I was talking about lemmy
Interesting so I can't visit a Lemmy community as a magazine within kbin if I don't have an account?
Yes you can, even on Mastodon, and you can subscribe to PeerTube channels in /kbin and Lemmy, etc.
You can if someone else subscribed to it in the past. If nobody ever did, then that community is unknown to kbin and you won't find any data on it whether you're logged in or not.
In that case, how often is the lemme community updated on the kbin instance? Does it download updates every time the user visits?
My understanding is that instances have worker threads that continually pull new data from linked communities (the ones at least 1 person is subscribed to). It should be almost instant but recently it's sometimes delayed due to huge influx of traffic.
But you can discover it for your instance, no?
Yep, you can search by name specifically on https://kbin.social/search (or your kbin instance) and subscribe to it, then it starts getting synced.