Mastodon is often used to distribute illegal content. If you self host you need to be ready to deal with this stuff. Like with self hosted SMTP server.
> It’s mostly for me and friends I know personally – nothing like the bigger, public ones.
I'd agree with you if it had thousands of users, but not when the user count is 8. If you have 8 users on your SMTP server, damn easy to know with certainty if any of them did anything that might be considered malicious.
In reality, it barely makes a difference if you want to avoid hotlinking (and that has other bad privacy privacy implications, now all your users load bad content).
Law enforcement makes no difference between proxying, caching and storing indefinitely. At least not during all the steps that precede your hardware being seized.
Mastodon is often used to distribute illegal content. If you self host you need to be ready to deal with this stuff. Like with self hosted SMTP server.
Not saying it is good or bad, just reality!