this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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One downside/senario I'm worried about is what happens when something really bad happens. Like illegal authorities-get-involved bad? Like leaking sensitive government information or a homegrown r/ jailbait situation that the media catches wind of. Stuff can't be permanently deleted, at least not without nuking everything around it...which people might be tempted to do. And that's basically turning anything seriously incriminating into essentially an infohazard that could get you nuked because you're in an instance where someone else from it commented on the thing or something. And any attempt to and defederation from the offending parties probably isn't the hard shutoff that the authorities would be demanding in such a situation. Even if nothing effectively happens to the greater Federation, it would be a PR nightmare that would probably kill any future attempts of evangelising the platform in the future, especially to bigger communities looking for a new place to stay.
Places like Reddit have mods and admins that worst case scenario, can be the scapegoats. Lemmy doesn't really have that layer of protection because of how esoteric it is to the layman.
Yeah this happened to some guy in Australia hosting a tor exit node if I recall? I saw it on Lemmy, but didn't save the link. Since he wasn't behind a corporation, I think he got held personally liable. Best bet in hosting an instance is probably to form a corporation for some legal protections.
In the same way that it's part of the fediverse specs to copy info from another instance when a user requests it, it's also part of the specs to delete info when an instance requests it. Goes both ways. The only way it becomes a problem is if your instance deliberately disables certain functionality, or otherwise fails to moderate.
Of course if a user copies the info locally and holds a copy there's no stopping them, but reddit would have the same issue there.
Sure this is the case? Because Mastodon had that problem before. I thought every federated platform had permanent deletion implemented by now? And federation of the deletion and cached data...