Self hosting my own Lemmy instance was so much fun
Y'all should try it! I loved seeing it popping on other instances' /instances page, and seeing it polling other communities. Also changing the background in my theme was lit.
Lemmy's hosting documentation is a bit rough around the edges, especially the ARM situation (and its contemporary solution), so I had some extra tinkering to do. No shade at all yeah? I appreciate every bit of their work and I jotted down some points that I need to consolidate into a documentation PR soon.
Anyway, I feel like the extra @... on our usernames should be worn as a badge of honor you feel me? ;)
You are viewing a single comment
I think I have the tech know-how to do it, but what worries me is that users could post illegal content, which my instance could then pull in. Since it’s on my storage, I would be legally responsible for that. So I’d have to constantly check, probably. How do others do this?
Thats what worries me as well. I‘m an aspiring self hoster. Got many services but still learning. Having to deal with authorities is not something I look forward to.
For CSAM in the US, you have to have actual knowledge to be responsible for reporting. If you view the image or it is reported, you must act. Its pretty much the same for DMCA.
The risk is pretty small IMO, especially if you (or your friends) are the only one that use your instance (with registration closed so no random users uploading stuff to your own instance). If you disable nsfw on your instance, the chance of storing illegal images should be pretty low, especially if the communities you subscribed are moderated as deletion from mods will eventually processed by your own instance. If this still worries you, just nuke pictrs directory every few months, perhaps automatically using a cron scripts that delete images/gifs older than a few months.
Interesting, thank you. If a user uploads something illegal to another instance, and a mod takes it down, does that deletion then also reliably propagate to my instance?
Unfortunately, I can't say for sure if your instance will reliably get the deletion requests and process them. I did a small test to see how deletion works a few days ago and it doesn't seem to propagate reliably as the deleted comment is still up in another instances, even now, though other instance such as lemmy.world seem to delete it. Not sure where it went wrong either, could either a bug, instances get overloaded and didn't receive activitypub message correctly, or OP's instance was improperly configured, but I sure hope it's just an isolated incident.
Like I said before, If this still worries you, you can just delete older image files in the pictrs directory every few months to make sure you don't host user-uploaded files for too long.
Thank you! That’s very useful in considerations.