I’ve fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It’s mainly so I don’t contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future.
But, one of the things that has me worried right now is how I could prevent illegal/unwanted content from being cached on my instance.
Aside from blocking entire instances, how can I stop a user from subscribing to a remote community that includes illegal/unwanted content?
What if they sub to an acceptable community (this one, for example) and someone posts something that escapes the mods’ attention temporarily, but that content ends up on my instance?
You can also remove specific remote communities, which bans them from your site instead of the entire remote instance. Make sure to use remove, not purge.
The community will not appear in the list nor be searchable.
Ah - cool. I wondered at the difference there. So removing them bans that community, whereas purge just erases them from local cache/storage?
Purge deletes everything, including the fact that you’ve deleted them and they become searchable again. It’s like a complete reset. Even the act of removing them is reset
You can purge, and then bring it up again and then remove if you want to delete any cached media or posts.
Gotcha - thanks for that. This is going to be a potential pitfall for the uninitiated. I can see inexperienced admins easily allowing others to store all manner of bad shit on their servers without realising.
Yes. That said, media uploaded by remote users is actually stored on the remote instance, not yours.
But aren’t thumbnails local?
I just checked and even thumbnails are remote.
Ah, even better. Thanks.