This is an excellent question that I've also had. I think (don't quote me on this) that it's hosted on whatever instance the community is based out of.

My understanding is that you've got essentially 3 different groups of things in lemmy. Users, communities, and posts/comments. Users are authenticated based on their home instance. Communities are stored on their home instance. Comments are stored in their associated community. When you post to a community on another instance, your post is transmitted to the other instance where it's stored. The reason (generally) that porn is banned on most lemmy instances is because the maintainer of that instance doesn't want the headache of having to moderate that content which is stored on their server. In the case of a federated instance though while the content might be cached on the server it isn't technically stored there so I don't think it runs into the same problems.

Now, what I don't know about, and someone who knows more about how the federation works hopefully does, is if the owner of an instance would ban federation with an instance hosting porn. Technically I think the owner of an instance can ban federation with any other instance, but I'm not sure they would go that far. I think it might depend on how good a job the other instance does of moderating their content. E.G. if as I suggested PornHub ran their own instance I don't think most instances would be opposed to federating with it because presumably PornHub already does a good job of policing NSFW content they host. On the other hand if you found some sketchy instance that was hosting lets call it legally dubious content, the instance owner might just ban federation with that instance, in which case I think it's communities would become inaccessible to you from your home instance. Of course you could make an account on that other instance and just sign in there, but that's kind of a PITA.

If your an expert on any of this and see somewhere I've got this wrong please correct me.

I suggested to PornHub that they should host their own lemmy instance for porn. It's stuck in limbo though awaiting mod approval.

Edit: I'm curious, I see I've gotten two downvotes, can someone who downvoted provide a reason why? Just anti-porn sentiment? Do you not want porn on lemmy? Don't like the company PornHub? Think it's a stupid idea for some reason? I'm serious, I'd like to know why you seem to disagree with the suggestion that PornHub should host a lemmy instance explicitly to post porn on. It's entirely possible I'm missing something here.

Yeah the way that was worded it was ambiguous, the number given could have referred to either the number of McDonalds outside the US or the number of other countries since both had been brought up previously. I myself on first reading it was like "I'm pretty sure there are more than 194 McDonalds outside of the US" before I realized they were referring to the number of countries there are.

I'm not sure I'd even try to give an exact number of countries since that changes somewhat depending on who and when you ask and how picky you want to be about what qualifies as a country.

For someone out of the loop, what's the deal with poa.st? I followed the link and it says its for shitposters which... doesn't sound good... but could mean a few different things.

They're the child focused wing of the christo-fascists. They're not going to be happy until they've converted the US into a white christian theocracy. Do you want Gilead? Because this is how you get Gilead.

The validator would have access to real references it can use to ensure some form of correctness

That's the crux of the problem, a LLM has no understanding of what it's saying, it doesn't know how to use references. All it knows is that in similar contexts this set of words tended to follow this other set of words. It doesn't actually understand anything. It's capable of producing output that looks correct to a casual glance but is often wildly wrong.

Just look at that legal filing that idiot lawyer used ChatGPT to generate. It produced fake references that were trivial for a real lawyer to spot because they used the wrong citation format for the district they were supposedly from. They looked like real citations because they were based on how real citations looked but it didn't understand that citations have different styles depending on the court district and that the claimed district and citation style must match.

LLMs are very good at producing convincing sounding bullshit, particular for the uninformed.

I saw a post here the other day where someone was saying they thought LLMs were great for learning because beginners often don't know where to start. There might be some merit to that if it's used carefully, but by the same token that's incredibly dangerous because it often takes very deep knowledge to see the various ways the LLMs output is wrong.

Smart devices aren't so much the issue as internet connected ones. I use a number of ZWave smart devices, but I avoid buying any smart device that connects with wifi. You do need some kind of hub device ultimately but even in that case you can use your own hardware and software for that.

This fresh influx of Reddit users into Lemmy is definitely a strong opportunity for Lemmy to expand and it needs to capitalize on it. The next big hurdle though is going to be porn. Currently nobody allows porn on Lemmy because it's too much of an administration headache. If they were smart (and they usually are) an enterprising porn network like PornHub should stand up a Lemmy instance to host porn out of. If Lemmy doesn't come up with a solution for porn though I'm not sure it will actually be able to truly replace Reddit.

No self promotion is a very simple quality filter. Pretty much everyone is proud of something they made, but finding someone else that also is willing to promote it is much harder. By blocking self promotion they're setting a low bar that needs to be cleared where you have to find someone else to vouch for you. That said, once at least one other person has posted about it you should be allowed to post as well since you've effectively cleared that bar at that point.

Honestly I would have joined beehaw except I disagree with the no downvote policy. It forces you into a terrible tradeoff where either you upvote literally everything that isn't bad, but then have no way of actually indicating truly good content, or else only upvote the truly good content, but then have no way of indicating bad content. You could always block users that post bad content, but that's a super heavy handed approach with no real nuance, and doesn't help improve the community.

I've yet to see one. It's one of the handful of things that don't exist yet on Lemmy that I'd actually miss from reddit. There's a few speciality subs that don't have any parallels on here but there's nothing stopping that content though. Porn on the other hand seems to be universally banned on every Lemmy instance I've ever seen. I guess moderating that content is just too much of a headache for most people.

When RIF stops working that will be the end of Reddit on my mobile. I'll never use that pile of hot garbage they call a client. I can't say for sure I'll never use it on the desktop again, at least as long as old reddit keeps working. If they kill old reddit though, yeah I'll never go back.