Thinking of moving to sh.itjust.works from lemmy.world - one question about the rules though...
If I post nsfw onto a community hosted on lemmynsfw, for example, from the sh.itjust.works account, would that breaking the no pron rule, or not necessarily, since it's posted on a different instance?
No, it doesn't break the rule IMO. Yes, the image is hosted on sh.itjust.works, but it's not posted in any community on sh.itjust.works, so... it should be OK.
From what The Dude said initially it's to avoid having to deal with the legal side of hosting content that might be illegal. In that instance it being hosted here is the problem.
It's fundamental to the design of Lemmy's implementation of federation via ActivityPub that all content from an account be hosted on the account's instance.
If it's an ActivityPub feature, this is somewhat of a poor design if you ask me (or at least not being able to change this). He's right, this feature could put instance owners in legal problems, because the data in question is actually stored on their server, not the server that you posted the image on.
Indeed, this is a huge design flaw. You would basically have to police everything that users post on other instances as well. Do you even have moderation tools for this?
I really have no idea how other instances actually confirm that you're posting from another instance, not just emulating that you're a user on another instance. That might be a part of ActivityPub, but I haven't looked at code, wouldn't know.
Huh. Well that just makes no sense structurally. Thanks for pointing it out though.
How does this thing work at all? You would expect it to all be hosted to the site the community is hosted on. So now when a comment thread is fetched, it has to go to all these other servers for every single comment from another instance. This is actually mind-boggling.
Does anyone have an ELI5 for why it's done this way?
Actually, the post content is saved on the instance where the post is posted as well. That post is called a copy, the original resides on the poster's originating instance. But, not the media, no, that resides on the instance where the poster resgistered.
Basically everything goes through your instance. If you make a post, it goes to the copy of the community that's on your instance. Likewise if you comment. If you join a community, your instance starts listening for changes and stores those on the instance.
That way if another instance goes down, you still have a copy of all of the content there that someone on your instance is interested in. So that way pretty much everything is backed up.
I personally think we can do better, but it's an easy enough system that all but guarantees that content doesn't disappear. You could even set up an instance that never deletes anything if you want to make sure you don't lose any data.
I wasted like a minute looking through your post history to realize you meant a comment. Fix your comment. While you're at it, link to your other comment instead of just saying "down below", because it was above your comment it in my app.