In my opinion the biggest issue the author points out is that cached materials are sometimes retained even after moderator action. Which honestly just sounds like a straight up bug more than anything. Though if I were running an instance, the feds showing up at my door with a warrant because I’ve been accidentally distributing CSAM would be my nightmare scenario. And of course jurisdiction plays a part, too: an American user on a Canadian server might see drawn depictions of sexualized minors, think “weird but not illegal,” and now the Canadian admin has content that’s illegal in Canada on their Canadian server and has no idea.

IMO I think the best solution to this is something similar to what Renaud Chaput (Mastodon’s resident infra boffin) described in his recent blog post. Effectively, give admins a way to hand this off to pluggable third-party services. Admins that are worried about this sort of thing can then have some degree of safety via e.g. PhotoDNA, whereas others can take on additional risk and preserve additional privacy.

All that said: yeah the headline makes it sound like .social is some 8chan-esque hellhole, whereas in reality my feed is 99% German programmers sharing milquetoast political takes.