If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?

VitaminH@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 163 points –

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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Yeah post content I understand. Linked or posted images though are not consistently handled, so I'm not sure what circumstances lead to my instance pulling the image from a remote community.

I don't think lemmy typically does. I'm often on networks that block a lot of the Internet, and even thumbnails on posts from other instances or their community images get blocked when I can't communicate with them.

Right now, your profile pic for example is coming from aussie.zone, and the community pic is coming from lemmy.world, but I'm on fbxl lemmy a completely different instance from either of them.

Yeah profile pics are fine. I'm specifically talking about image posts. Next time I spot one I'll see if the post came from a user on my instance. If not, I have no idea why the post image would be on my instance.

If you right click on the image, then click inspect, then you can see the url for the image. Often it's coming from somewhere else.

Incidentally, my soapbox instance is different then lemmy -- it acts as a proxy, so it soaks up all the images and then hosts them from my one server.

Nope... thats what I'm talking about.. image posts to remote communities, with the images being sourced from my instance. Like I said, next time I spot it I'll dig into it further.

What software is your instance running?

I'm on Lemmy 0.18.0 right now. I host a number of other kinds of software too, I've been all-in on the fediverse for a few years.