How will Lemmy handle illegal content like drug dealing, child porn, snuff movies etc? On Reddit, the corporation is accountable so they will make an effort to ensure non of this exists on their platform. And they would face legal troubles if they failed to act.
But as Lemmy is decentralised this isn’t really possible. Sure the main instances can defederate from bad instances, but those instances could still operate and be accessible on the web. Especially if they’re hosted in countries outside of the western sphere of influence. Multiple bad instances could federate and duplicate the illegal content pretty easily, making it difficult for the authorities to keep it shut down. Has this been thought about already?
With Mastodon, there are blocklists that make it fairly easy for moderators to block instances that post illegal content (or anything else, for that matter). I imagine something similar could be done with Lemmy.
Who will the blocklist affect? mods don’t control what’s being posted on another instance and if there are instances where that’s commonplace they’ll just post there
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I’m not sure I understand your question! Lemmy is FOSS, so anyone can set up an instance, invite users and put stuff on there. But, if everyone else defederates from that instance, it won’t show up anywhere except for that instance. So the illegal content on that hypothetical Lemmy instance isn’t the responsibility of anyone except the owner of that instance. It’s not the fault of the Lemmy designers any more than it’s Microsoft’s fault if I put something illegal on my Windows PC.