I’ve been considering self-hosting for over a year now, but I’m still concerned if the feds will come knocking at my door for something someone else does.
For example, if someone on my server follows an individual or community and they posts something illegal (i.e. unauthorized sexually exploitive images) that content could be stored on my server. Wouldn’t’ I be legally liable for such?
I mean #fucklaws and everything, but I don’t want to end up in a cage and certainly not for something someone else did.
Lemmy sometimes caches remote content in pict-rs. It’s a bit broken so you usually don’t see it, but it does do it occasional
IIRC Lemmy preloads all thumbnails for posts in communities you subscribe to into pictrs to be cached for like a month or something. So, yeah…
https://lemmy.gwa.app/comment/16763 Relevant. It’s not only thumbnails currently
It barely works on my old version of lemmy, probably fixed now then. It would be nice if there was a was to turn that off and only use pictrs only for locally uploaded images. Since I’m the only person here caching isn’t too important.
I wonder if I could shut pictrs down and only use an external image hosting for images?
I believe the Pictrs is a hard dependency and Lemmy just won’t work without it, and there is no way to disable the caching. You can move all of the actual images to object storage as of v0.4.0 of Pictrs if that helps.
Other fediverse servers like Mastodon actually (can be configured to) proxy all remote media (for both privacy and caching reasons), so I imagine Lemmy will move that way and probably depend even more on Pictrs.
Might be liable, then. You can never explain technology to a bureaucrat.