Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
No, we admins have a “purge” button nukes things from the database.
Ok at least y’all have that. Do you happen to know how much legal trouble you’d be in if your server did - temporarily - contain illegal images? Is that the sort of thing that - if you immediately deleted and worked with the FBI, you wouldn’t get in trouble? I’m considering starting an instance for me and my wife because we have slow internet but - if we cached everything in an instance at home - it would be über fast. But I’m worried about the legality.
There’s a nice page on the legalities of user content here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
Instances don’t cache images from remote users. No one is going to put you in jail for reporting illegal stuff when you find it and it would have to be posted by one of your users to make it to your storage.