On feddit.de, lemmy.world is only temporarily defederated because of CSAM until a patch is merged into Lemmy that prevents images from being downloaded to your own instance.
So I'll just be patient and wait. It's understandable the admins don't want to get problems with law enforcement.
Yes, but arguably it was never very scalable for federated software to store large media. It gets utterly massive quick. Third party image/video hosts that specialize in hosting those things can do a better job. And honestly, that's the kinda data that is just better suited for centralization. Many people can afford to spin up a server that mostly just stores text and deals with basic interactions. Large images or streaming video gets expensive fast, especially if the site were to ever get even remotely close to reddit levels.
How would one realize CSAM protection? You'd need actual ML to check for it, and I do not think there are trained models available. And now find someone that wants to train such a model, somehow. Also, running an ML model would be quite expensive in energy and hardware.
There are models for detecting adult material, idk how well they’d work on CSAM though. Additionally, there exists a hash identification system for known images, idk if it’s available to the public, but I know apple has it.
That'd still be exploitable. You could just run 3 of your own instances. Coming up with a system to stop malicious users that can't be gamed would be tricky.
Not to shill but I just found the other day that cloudflare has a csam scanning and reporting engine built into their proxies. In theory it gives them a window into the data stream by them decrypting and re-encrypting that could snatch a password hash, but 2FA makes that useless after a minute. Basically it scans anything that gets put in the cache and reports it, notifies you to pull it down, and automatically puts up a 451 block on the link.