What are the risks associated with this? With image uploading capabilities and the like I’m thinking there might be an issue with people posting highly illegal content. I used to run some smaller forums 15 years ago and that went fine, but it feels like the risks are higher today… I’m both thinking about one’s own personal mental health in needing to moderate such content, and also whether it’ll be a legal liability to run an instance if people post illegal content.
I don’t think it’s as bad as you think. If someone uploads illegal content to any service, they remove it of course. Same thing on Lemmy.
Original images and videos are not spread across instances, they stay on the instance they were uploaded on. However, thumbnails are distributed.
Images are definitely uploaded to Lemmy instances.
It’s uploaded to one instance and other instances are linking to that one for the picture.