I have a (dumb) question that I’m not sure you can answer. So my home instance is lemmy.one, and say there’s a porn instance. Porn isn’t allowed on my instance, but I can interact with and post to other instances. So I post a picture to a community on the porn instance. Is that content hosted on my home instance (against the rules) or on the porn instance where it’s allowed?
This is an excellent question that I’ve also had. I think (don’t quote me on this) that it’s hosted on whatever instance the community is based out of.
My understanding is that you’ve got essentially 3 different groups of things in lemmy. Users, communities, and posts/comments. Users are authenticated based on their home instance. Communities are stored on their home instance. Comments are stored in their associated community. When you post to a community on another instance, your post is transmitted to the other instance where it’s stored. The reason (generally) that porn is banned on most lemmy instances is because the maintainer of that instance doesn’t want the headache of having to moderate that content which is stored on their server. In the case of a federated instance though while the content might be cached on the server it isn’t technically stored there so I don’t think it runs into the same problems.
Now, what I don’t know about, and someone who knows more about how the federation works hopefully does, is if the owner of an instance would ban federation with an instance hosting porn. Technically I think the owner of an instance can ban federation with any other instance, but I’m not sure they would go that far. I think it might depend on how good a job the other instance does of moderating their content. E.G. if as I suggested PornHub ran their own instance I don’t think most instances would be opposed to federating with it because presumably PornHub already does a good job of policing NSFW content they host. On the other hand if you found some sketchy instance that was hosting lets call it legally dubious content, the instance owner might just ban federation with that instance, in which case I think it’s communities would become inaccessible to you from your home instance. Of course you could make an account on that other instance and just sign in there, but that’s kind of a PITA.
If your an expert on any of this and see somewhere I’ve got this wrong please correct me.
Yes, I’ve definitely wondered about this and then also how your subscriptions work. Are they associated with your account or can you have multiple accounts logged in on the Jerboa app and see all of those subscriptions at once? I haven’t set up a second account yet to mess with that but am curious.
Subscriptions are tied to your account. You can have multiple accounts in Jerboa (even on multiple different instances) but each one is independent of the others. Anything your subscribed to in one is contained entirely in that one. You only see the subscriptions of the account you’re currently signed in to. All your accounts are listed on a popout and you can click on each one to switch which account you’re currently signed into. All your actions and everything you view are relative to the current account.
So the other comment chain in this thread. While I was correct in general apparently I was wrong in the specific case of embedded media. If you upload an image that gets stored on your home instance, not on the instance the community belongs on which is highly relevant to this discussion. Currently what exactly is meant by an instances “no NSFW content” rule is kind of ambiguous. Does that mean no creating NSFW communities, no posting NSFW posts/comments to any local communities, no subscribing to NSFW communities, or no posting to NSFW communities anywhere.
The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance. That’ll probably annoy the moderators of your server, but you’ll have to ask them to be sure.
If you upload your porn some place else and submit the video/image link, the file should never hit your instance.
There’s also the profile page to consider. Even if you don’t upload anything to your own instance, your posts will show up on your profile for people browsing your instance. Your instance moderators will have to decide if that’s a problem or not.
I’d think anything flagged correctly and hosted on a porn friendly site should be alright, but I’m no moderator.
The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance.
That seems like kind of a problem/bad design. The actual text content of the post is stored on the other instance right? If the moderator of the other instance deletes your post, does the embedded media get deleted off your instance?
This is not at all how I assumed this would work, and raises some questions about the value of federation if you’re going to end up needing to manage multiple logins on multiple instances in order to manage their various posting policies.
I believe text is indeed mirrored. Images will disappear if the instance admin deletes them, though.
I don’t think you’ll end up with many accounts, to be honest. The three categories I’ve encountered on Lemmy so far are “normal”, “porn”, and “extremist”. Blocking lemmygrad seems to have gotten rid of most of the extremists and so far the porn accounts all seem to be isolates in their own little section of the Fediverse.
I’d think a normal person would maybe need a second account for browsing porn, but that’s it.
You’ll always be subject to other servers’ posting policies but when we’re talking about communities that just makes sense. You won’t be allowed to post hardcore porn in c/knitting even if the c/porn community doesn’t mind. Besides, communities exist on specific servers, so they should automatically follow the posting guidelines of the servers they’re on or risk getting deleted.
The only hairy issue I can think of is the fact that uploaded media automatically gets uploaded to your instance. That may confuse people.
Yeah, it was that last point that’s the sticking point. Like you I agree and would expect that when you post to a community you follow that communities guidelines, but since media apparently uploads to your instance not the instance hosting the community now you’re getting a 3rd party involved. If media was hosted on the same instance of the community I don’t think we’d have a problem and you wouldn’t need to worry about violating the posting guidelines of your home instance.
Personally, while I might create a “normal” account and a porn account, I definitely don’t want to feel like I have to do that. I think you should be able to create your account in any instance you want and post to any community you want (assuming said community isn’t on an instance which has had federation blocked from your home instance) without having to worry about the content rules of your home instance. I definitely think the embedded media handling needs to have a second look given to it.
As long as you’re staying aware of what you’re doing and your porn instance doesn’t break any laws (the Fediverse does have some defederated servers because of “loli” porn…) I think you could just get away with a single account, specifically one on the most permissive server. At least I don’t see why normal posts from lenny.xxx accounts would need to be blocked on other servers.
The real challenge is moderation. Porn servers often attract people who are not exactly model citizens and without strict and clear moderation, an instance can quickly become a cesspool. Once that happens, other servers start blocking that instance and your account on that server loses some of the benefits of the Fediverse.
With how expensive hosting is, I expect a lot of content to be hosted by third parties anyway. Imgur seems to be a popular choice.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
It should be noted that the content storage policy depends on your platform of choice, though. kbin and Mastodon will cache/mirror content from other servers into their local cache, for example.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
Wouldn’t you need to moderate the contents of the community anyway? Does it fundamentally change things whether the cross posting is done via posting from a different instance or by the poster just switching accounts? In either case the post is ending up in the community and you still need to moderate it. Having media stored in your home instance just makes things really awkward because now as a user I have to contend with both the server wide rules of my home instance and the rules of the community I’m posting in. I just worry we’re going to see things fracture into two nearly completely separate fediverses, there will be the NSFW adult fediverse, and then the SFW fediverse and you won’t be able to subscribe to content from one on the other.
With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
I have a (dumb) question that I’m not sure you can answer. So my home instance is lemmy.one, and say there’s a porn instance. Porn isn’t allowed on my instance, but I can interact with and post to other instances. So I post a picture to a community on the porn instance. Is that content hosted on my home instance (against the rules) or on the porn instance where it’s allowed?
This is an excellent question that I’ve also had. I think (don’t quote me on this) that it’s hosted on whatever instance the community is based out of.
My understanding is that you’ve got essentially 3 different groups of things in lemmy. Users, communities, and posts/comments. Users are authenticated based on their home instance. Communities are stored on their home instance. Comments are stored in their associated community. When you post to a community on another instance, your post is transmitted to the other instance where it’s stored. The reason (generally) that porn is banned on most lemmy instances is because the maintainer of that instance doesn’t want the headache of having to moderate that content which is stored on their server. In the case of a federated instance though while the content might be cached on the server it isn’t technically stored there so I don’t think it runs into the same problems.
Now, what I don’t know about, and someone who knows more about how the federation works hopefully does, is if the owner of an instance would ban federation with an instance hosting porn. Technically I think the owner of an instance can ban federation with any other instance, but I’m not sure they would go that far. I think it might depend on how good a job the other instance does of moderating their content. E.G. if as I suggested PornHub ran their own instance I don’t think most instances would be opposed to federating with it because presumably PornHub already does a good job of policing NSFW content they host. On the other hand if you found some sketchy instance that was hosting lets call it legally dubious content, the instance owner might just ban federation with that instance, in which case I think it’s communities would become inaccessible to you from your home instance. Of course you could make an account on that other instance and just sign in there, but that’s kind of a PITA.
If your an expert on any of this and see somewhere I’ve got this wrong please correct me.
Yes, I’ve definitely wondered about this and then also how your subscriptions work. Are they associated with your account or can you have multiple accounts logged in on the Jerboa app and see all of those subscriptions at once? I haven’t set up a second account yet to mess with that but am curious.
Subscriptions are tied to your account. You can have multiple accounts in Jerboa (even on multiple different instances) but each one is independent of the others. Anything your subscribed to in one is contained entirely in that one. You only see the subscriptions of the account you’re currently signed in to. All your accounts are listed on a popout and you can click on each one to switch which account you’re currently signed into. All your actions and everything you view are relative to the current account.
Exactly what I was wondering. Thanks!
This is great info, thank you!
So the other comment chain in this thread. While I was correct in general apparently I was wrong in the specific case of embedded media. If you upload an image that gets stored on your home instance, not on the instance the community belongs on which is highly relevant to this discussion. Currently what exactly is meant by an instances “no NSFW content” rule is kind of ambiguous. Does that mean no creating NSFW communities, no posting NSFW posts/comments to any local communities, no subscribing to NSFW communities, or no posting to NSFW communities anywhere.
The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance. That’ll probably annoy the moderators of your server, but you’ll have to ask them to be sure.
If you upload your porn some place else and submit the video/image link, the file should never hit your instance.
There’s also the profile page to consider. Even if you don’t upload anything to your own instance, your posts will show up on your profile for people browsing your instance. Your instance moderators will have to decide if that’s a problem or not.
I’d think anything flagged correctly and hosted on a porn friendly site should be alright, but I’m no moderator.
That seems like kind of a problem/bad design. The actual text content of the post is stored on the other instance right? If the moderator of the other instance deletes your post, does the embedded media get deleted off your instance?
This is not at all how I assumed this would work, and raises some questions about the value of federation if you’re going to end up needing to manage multiple logins on multiple instances in order to manage their various posting policies.
I believe text is indeed mirrored. Images will disappear if the instance admin deletes them, though.
I don’t think you’ll end up with many accounts, to be honest. The three categories I’ve encountered on Lemmy so far are “normal”, “porn”, and “extremist”. Blocking lemmygrad seems to have gotten rid of most of the extremists and so far the porn accounts all seem to be isolates in their own little section of the Fediverse.
I’d think a normal person would maybe need a second account for browsing porn, but that’s it.
You’ll always be subject to other servers’ posting policies but when we’re talking about communities that just makes sense. You won’t be allowed to post hardcore porn in c/knitting even if the c/porn community doesn’t mind. Besides, communities exist on specific servers, so they should automatically follow the posting guidelines of the servers they’re on or risk getting deleted.
The only hairy issue I can think of is the fact that uploaded media automatically gets uploaded to your instance. That may confuse people.
Yeah, it was that last point that’s the sticking point. Like you I agree and would expect that when you post to a community you follow that communities guidelines, but since media apparently uploads to your instance not the instance hosting the community now you’re getting a 3rd party involved. If media was hosted on the same instance of the community I don’t think we’d have a problem and you wouldn’t need to worry about violating the posting guidelines of your home instance.
Personally, while I might create a “normal” account and a porn account, I definitely don’t want to feel like I have to do that. I think you should be able to create your account in any instance you want and post to any community you want (assuming said community isn’t on an instance which has had federation blocked from your home instance) without having to worry about the content rules of your home instance. I definitely think the embedded media handling needs to have a second look given to it.
As long as you’re staying aware of what you’re doing and your porn instance doesn’t break any laws (the Fediverse does have some defederated servers because of “loli” porn…) I think you could just get away with a single account, specifically one on the most permissive server. At least I don’t see why normal posts from lenny.xxx accounts would need to be blocked on other servers.
The real challenge is moderation. Porn servers often attract people who are not exactly model citizens and without strict and clear moderation, an instance can quickly become a cesspool. Once that happens, other servers start blocking that instance and your account on that server loses some of the benefits of the Fediverse.
With how expensive hosting is, I expect a lot of content to be hosted by third parties anyway. Imgur seems to be a popular choice.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
It should be noted that the content storage policy depends on your platform of choice, though. kbin and Mastodon will cache/mirror content from other servers into their local cache, for example.
Wouldn’t you need to moderate the contents of the community anyway? Does it fundamentally change things whether the cross posting is done via posting from a different instance or by the poster just switching accounts? In either case the post is ending up in the community and you still need to moderate it. Having media stored in your home instance just makes things really awkward because now as a user I have to contend with both the server wide rules of my home instance and the rules of the community I’m posting in. I just worry we’re going to see things fracture into two nearly completely separate fediverses, there will be the NSFW adult fediverse, and then the SFW fediverse and you won’t be able to subscribe to content from one on the other.
With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.