A Lemmy.World user informed us about an instance we are federated with that was hosting very illegal content a while back. This was a result of an attack more than a year ago, and said content federated to many other instances, which made local copies of the material. Unfortunately, when this material was taken down at the source, that action did not federate to all linked instances, meaning that there are still some instances showing this material.
Once we were made aware of this, we realized that this was likely not the only occurrence, so we started looking for other instances where this content may also still exist. We have identified more than 50 affected instances and already reached out to many of them to inform them about this content to have it taken down.
It seems that it is quite difficult for instance admins to do things like permanently remove posts locally which have already been removed by a mod somewhere else. Ironically, by intentionally making it difficult to access, its inaccessibility afterwards makes it difficult to… uh… access, e.g. to delete it, very much a design flaw.
The linked post explains:
It seems that it is quite difficult for instance admins to do things like permanently remove posts locally which have already been removed by a mod somewhere else. Ironically, by intentionally making it difficult to access, its inaccessibility afterwards makes it difficult to… uh… access, e.g. to delete it, very much a design flaw.