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?
It’s like they host those sites on a apache server.
Lemmy is just the subjacent software that runs an instance.
Authorities would track the illegal content the same way they do on any other website I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Also descentralized illegal content exist since P2P protocols exist. I don’t see anything new with lemmy.
It just makes it easier to find. Instance owners/admins are legally bound by the host country’s laws, so the smarter ones know which countries they should host their stuff.