this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Content isn't cached unless someone follows it anyways.
And I'm not sure what you mean with that latter part; what difference would this make in what content admins can see before they cast their judgement on a server?
What op said still stands: if only one of your users follow a high-traffic, heavy-content /c/, then the server is caching all of that content for one person.
E.g., there's this great bot on Mastodon that posts random fractals, and the highest-voted ones "breed" to create a new generation of child fractals. The bot posts a static image and an animated movie of each new child every 4 hours. The images are ca 5mb each; the movies are between 20 & 40mb ea. That is, on average, 210mb/d, or 1.4gb per week. That's a lot of data. You might, as an admin offering a free service, not want to have to pay for that much storage just because one or two users are suscribed to /c/flamereactor ("FlameReactor" is the name, so you can find this mind-blowingly awesome bot). There's also bandwidth considerations, both on the pull and when users request the content.
I like the idea, though, and will suggest a tweak, tried and true from Usenet days: provide the ability to unblock to only paying users. It'd give admins control, plus money to offset storage costs. Maybe provide three options to admins: full defederation; auto-block with any user able to unblock, for odeous but low impact sices; and auto-block with unblock for only users in some group - close friends, paying users, whatever.
Lemmy could also transcribe content into links back to the source, but that's just punting the bandwidth costs onto someone else, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is frowned upon within The Federation (although it's common practice with Reddit and X(twitter) content).
Mastodon servers typically don't federate images, though. Also, I don't think people will defederate an entire server for one bot anyways.
A lot of legal issues get worse though if they occur as part of a paid service.
There are a lot of ways it could go wrong, for sure. IANAL, but lots of small and large companies have and do navigate these issues. But I wasn't talking about legally contentious content; this would be a work-aruund for stuff that's expensive to cache, or stuff you just don't agree with and so don't want to absorb the cost out of the goodness of yous heart. Just continue to defederate if you have any doubt.
Anyway, it was just a potential work-around to address OP's issue. I'm not a Lemmy dev and won't be implementing it.
Admins need to make sure they do not host illegal content. They can not do that if they do not see the content so they would likely still have to look at all of it just for the benefit of the few users on their instance who change the default. Instead they could just defederate and not have to worry about that.
There are great sites like fediseer.com to keep track of suspicious instances. And if those users see illegal content they can report it to the admins.