Looking to maybe self host my own instance, I’m still learning about the fediverse. If a different instance that I federate with hosts something illegal are there risks to me? Is anything from other instances hosted on my server like a copy of it? Or would I only end up hosting things my users post? I’m paranoid and sorry if this is a silly question.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote a pretty good blog post on the legality of the Fediverse, around the time Mastodon was getting popular. It probably applies to Lemmy too. It’s worth a read to familiarize yourself of what kind of legal things you’ll be getting yourself into. You’re on the right track; you can control you and your friends’ content, but you can’t control remote content that gets pushed to your server and that’s the part to worry the most.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
One thing that stood out is to register yourself as a DMCA agent. It costs $6 or something. Having an agent on record gives instance admins certain protection.
Thank ye,
I wonder how much of an impact being in the EU will have on that.
This is awesome info. There should be a place to document all the nuance around hosting an instance plus some tips and tricks.
There should be a place to document all the nuance around hosting an instance plus some tips and tricks.
The Wiki: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Lemmy%3F
Hopefully it gets new contributors and maintainers from all the new users.
Yikes, I didn’t even know there was a wiki. Thank you!
Awesome, thanks 🤘
Text is copied to your instance’s database, but any images are hosted on the other instances and simply linked to. Worst case scenario, you get told to delete something that’s illegal in the country in which you host the instance, you comply, and everything’s peachy.
Edit: That being said, I’m currently hosting an instance for myself and a few friends, and it’s been smooth-sailing. Just make sure to require email verification or admin approval for new sign-ups (or disable them entirely) if you don’t want to be overrun with bots.
That isn’t entirely true. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve definitely seen image posts made to remote communities that are hosted on my instance.
I’ve seen image posts I make on other instances, but the image is hosted on my own instance and just linked to the other instance.
That may explain it… point being, content for remote communities isn’t entirely “remote”. I’d like to understand what goes where a lot better. I’ve not found it explained anywhere, and I’m not a coder so can’t just “read the code yourself”.
I’m not familiar with lemmy, but I did pick up on the lotide code a bit recently (a similar project)
As I understand it, the text or html of the post end up in a sort of mailbox, then your server goes out to pick up the latest posts from there. It gets brought over to your instance, and then it lives there. Whatever happens, the posts your server collected are on your server, that’s how they’re displayed.
Then when you go to write a post, it’s stored locally and if it’s on a local community then it’s stored there and a copy is sent to the mailbox for others, and if it’s a remote community your server will reach out to the other server and drop the post there.
My lotide instance has some older posts from servers that stopped existing a long time ago because although it can’t get in touch with the remote community, the posts it did receive are still there.
Yeah post content I understand. Linked or posted images though are not consistently handled, so I’m not sure what circumstances lead to my instance pulling the image from a remote community.
I don’t think lemmy typically does. I’m often on networks that block a lot of the Internet, and even thumbnails on posts from other instances or their community images get blocked when I can’t communicate with them.
Right now, your profile pic for example is coming from aussie.zone, and the community pic is coming from lemmy.world, but I’m on fbxl lemmy a completely different instance from either of them.
Yeah profile pics are fine. I’m specifically talking about image posts. Next time I spot one I’ll see if the post came from a user on my instance. If not, I have no idea why the post image would be on my instance.
Yes I’d only be allowing people I know personally to create accounts. No other registration would be allowed. The last thing I’d want to be is another one of those bot filled instances that have been popping up.
If you’re in the US, The Communications Decency Act Section 230 has a couple powers.
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It removes liability to service providers for user generated content when active moderation is practiced, and
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It removes liability to service providers for any moderation actions taken to to moderate to reasonable community standards.
Prior to CDA230, the jurisprudence centered around 2 different cases. In one, an actively moderated system had illegal content and didn’t remove it in time, and in another case, a non-actively moderated system had illegal content and didn’t remove it in time. At that time, the actively moderated system was held to be liable for the illegal content, whereas the non-actively moderated system was held not to be liable for not removing the illegal content.
One caveat to that would be the DMCA, where liability protection as a service provider I think is contingent on there being a DMCA process available so infringing content can be removed.
I don’t know enough about how that all works with the fediverse, however.
The fediverse is still a relatively small thing, even with all the popularity it’s been getting.
So dmcas are yet to happen
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Where i live there is “the hoster privilige” hosters dont have to remove user content, only of somebody reports the content to you
Federation is implemented by copying the content from other servers to your database and file system, so if your users subscribe to something from a different server it will be copied to your server.
But it will be only served to your users, not to the public. Only the communities hosted on your instance will be served to the public.
Interesting so I can’t visit a Lemmy community as a magazine within kbin if I don’t have an account?
AFAIK only text is copied, media stays in the instance where the community is hosted.
It depends on the software. Some proxy all content from remote servers so you only connect to your home server (Mastodon). Others don’t, instead they make clients load remote content themselves (Lemmy). If you use browser client you can see all the connections being made.
Yes, depends on the software, the post is about lemmy so I was talking about lemmy
How much disk space would some need to plan for a small lemmy instance?
I’m running it in the smallest VPS of vultr with 25GB of disk.
This instance only has 3 users, with me being the only active. It says it’s been up for almost a month and I’ve only used 3GB.Here are the docker volumes which have the actual data of your instance, and from inside the DB the biggest table is the one called
activitywhich the devs said it’s only sometimes used to validate the data, but could be truncated if needed (there’s a schedule task which only keeps up to 6 months).
Also the thing to have in mind is to properly configure the logs of whichever installation guide you follow.
After that I’ve seen other admins say the next biggest is the media uploaded (from bigger instances).$ du -h --max-depth=1 640K ./pictrs 3.2G ./postgres 3.2G . lemmy=# select table_name, pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size(quote_ident(table_name))), pg_relation_size(quote_ident(table_name)) from information_schema.tables where table_schema = 'public' order by 3 desc; table_name | pg_size_pretty | pg_relation_size ----------------------------+----------------+------------------ activity | 2187 MB | 2292867072 comment | 56 MB | 58212352 person | 48 MB | 50307072 comment_like | 45 MB | 47161344 post_like | 22 MB | 22781952 comment_aggregates | 14 MB | 14811136 post | 13 MB | 13623296The
activitytable is also used to deduplicate incoming federation data, so instead of truncating it, I’d suggest deleting rows after a certain amount of time.For my personal instance, I set up a cron to delete entries older than 3 days, and my db is only ~500MB with a few weeks of content! I also haven’t seen any duplicated posts or comments. Even with Lemmy’s retries, 3 days seems to be long enough before dropping rows from that table.
Could you share the cron/script you use to do this? I’m interested in hosting my own Lemmy at some point, and having a script for that cleanup would be hugely helpful for me.
Definitely! I’m hosting in Kubernetes so I won’t post the full thing, but here’s the actual command that I run hourly. Make sure to replace the values for
database,username, andpassword.PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command="DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '3 days';"Awesome, that was just as straightforward as I was hoping it was, thanks! I am more familiar with MySQL as I haven’t used Postgres a ton but SQL is SQL after all lol
You’re welcome! Makes sense. They’re somehow so similar yet so different lol
How are you keeping your
pictrsdirectory so small?Mine is at about 5GB after two weeks with just a single user. 😬
I also have around 3GB used for
pictrsand I’m not really sure the best way to see what all content is in there.Yeah I haven’t uploaded any images on my instance myself. So none of those images are mine. Might do some reading tomorrow and see if there’s any mention of this in the past on other communities. It’s not an emergency but I’m curious.
That’s strange. Please let me know what you find out.
I had found an old post which indicates that post thumbnails are cached. So I guess there’s that.
In case you didn’t see it, the OP of this thread realized they didn’t setup their
pictrsAPI key… so I guess it’s possible to omit that and lemmy should still work. Not sure about the downsides.
Haha, I don’t know xP.
Just checked and it has only one image.Did you configure the pictrs API keys for Lemmy and for pictrs?
If they’re not configured then I could see Lemmy not even using pictrs.
Ohh!!
That’s what’s happening, I haven’t uploaded any pictures so I didn’t noticed, aside from that I’m not sure what are the other use cases of pictrsDon’t quote me on it but I think it, besides handling image uploads, caches thumbnails for link posts.
