Fediverse

Obviously it has questionable content which is not great to have stored on big servers for legal reasons.

It's less a function of size and more of location. Burggit serves lolicon, which isn't legal in a number of places like Canada, but is protected by the First Amendment in the US.

It looks like lemmy.world is in Germany or thereabouts, or at least that that's where the netblock of the last-hop router between it and me are located.

It sounds like Germany uses a roughly-similar rationale to the US, that the only content that is illegal involves actual abuse of minors or -- because it creates problems for enforcement against those -- content that looks realistic and is indistinguishable. Hence, lolicon sounds like it's okay in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors

In principle, the regulations in Chapter 13 of the German Criminal Law for offenses against sexual self-determination also prevent the public advocation and the degradation of minors as sexual objects.[73] The distribution of child pornography, defined as pornography relating to "sexual acts performed by, on or in the presence of a person under 14 years of age (child), the reproduction of a child in a state of full or partial undress in an unnaturally sexual pose, or the sexually provocative reproduction of a child's bare genitalia or bare buttocks," is criminalized with a penalty of imprisonment.[74] However, with regards to possession, only material depicting actual or realistic acts is criminalized.[74] For reproductions of persons over 14 but under 18 years (youth pornography), the penalty for distribution is imprisonment or a fine.[75]

Nevertheless, due to the guaranteed freedom of art,[76] fictional works were officially deemed legal or can be checked by a legal opinion.[77] According to German legal information websites, acquisition and possession of fictional pornography depicting minors where it is immediately apparent that the content is purely of fictional nature, such as cartoons and comics or anime and manga, are not prosecuted against unless it is not readily distinguishable whether the depiction is computer generated or real.[78][79][80] The Federal Government also made it clear that the criminal offense "should remain limited" to cases "in which an actual event is reproduced through video film, film or photo". On the other hand, it did not regard the sanction of the regulation as fulfilled in the case of "child pornographic novels, drawings and cartoons", because their possession did not contribute to children being abused as "actors" in pornographic recordings. [81]

That being said, given that lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and is a common choice for newcomers and presently often the first of what newcomers see of lemmy, setting aside legal concerns for the instance operators, I think that it might be a good idea to not have the default content have lolicon sprinkled through it. Obviously, that's up to the instance admins, but if that's not what they want to do, I'd suggest that it might be a good idea to have some instance that acts as a "front door" to recommend people to that does do some level of censorship.