This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

https://lemmy.world/post/3234363

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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      7 months ago

      Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It’s 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that’s not exactly great for a piracy community either.

      Image loading example

      I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could’ve been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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          7 months ago

          Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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          7 months ago

          I’m not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don’t know about this.

          The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that’s not implemented.

          Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I’m not sure why this feature was removed again. I can’t find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you’re curious.

        • nutsack@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          you could safeguard against this on the client side by not loading images from untrusted sources. irc clients did this

      • nutsack@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        i really wish there were a way to disable images with some of these fancy lemmy clients for android. I’m not interested in any of them

      • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?

          • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Comments like this sound like the “they write it off on tax” comments, where there’s this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can’t work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            It doesn’t matter if you don’t have limitless money to pay lawyers

            Since anyone can spin up a Lemmy server, at some point a rich person/persons will do so, which makes this a relevant question to ask.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?

          I was thinking the same thing, as a legal question.

          In the Fediverse, who’s the source/target for the law to look at, the originator, or all the cached copies on other servers?

          Edit: Basically, what this comment describes…

          Then, who do you sue? The person downloading the product? The person hosting the product? The person providing a link to the hosted data? The person providing a platform for people to link things? The person who allows their platform to federate with another platform that does?

          If we’re talking about P2P sharing, then in a way no one is hosting the data.