I was recently thinking about how amazing it is that with this decentralized community we would have no censorship from big corporations and then I asked myself: what about illegal content? The kind of content that really should not be shared? As an example, what if someone creates a Lemmy instance and starts creating a community around CP? Or human trafficking? How do we deal with it? I know that instances can choose with whom they can access the content, so if most popular instances blacklist that “illegal” instance its content wouldn’t be easily visible, but it would still be in the Fediverse. Also, will all popular instances have to be quick to blacklist these “illegal” instances? Isn’t that a little to difficult? If we go the other way, where they create a whitelist, wouldn’t that harm small legit instances? Is there a plan to fight off illegal content?
If it’s still on the internet you report them to law enforcement. But I’d bet that those intent on hosting those kinds of materials would have already started their own instances on the dark web and there sadly isn’t much we can do in that case. Only way to deal with them seems to be law enforcement’s approach of trapping those predators by posing as clients but then again, that’s their job, not yours. What you can do is 1- defederate, 2- warn other instance admins and 3- report to the police.
Which is the the scenario I talked about of having a “blacklist”. You saind on step 2 to “warn other instance admins”. As I see it I would have to first, know who are the admins of every popular instance, then I have to manually warn them one by one, and that is assuming I did not forget any. And we are not even talking about other Services like Mastodon that could communicate with this “illegal content” will I have to warn the admins of the instances there as well? I think what I’m asking is: Is there a way to easily do this? A report system not for a local community, but for the Fediverse itself? And on step 3 you said: “report to the police”. What would my local police be able to do with a server running on a random country anywhere in the world?
Every instance will have a list of admins in the sidebar on the “main page” (the page the pops up when you just type in the instance domain). And you aren’t warning every admin. Just the admin of the instance you are looking from and (if you want) the admin of the instance you found the illegal material on.
“Law enforcement” would be a better way to phrase it. Your countries higher level law enforcement should have a way to report such things and, one would hope, would have a way to pass that information on to the relevant agency with jurisdiction.
As for a way of reporting a community/instance to the “Fediverse”? Not really. The whole point is that everything is decentralized. It’s up to each instance to decide what is unacceptable for them.