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.