• snickers@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.

    I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!

    It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.

    Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?

    • Jackthelad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the “problem” is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.

      But obviously that’s too much work and it’s easier to just be a crybaby.

    • Bappity@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don’t really have much choice in this matter considering there’s no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they’d likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing

    • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.

    • SpyingEnvy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.

    • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s a fair point. Anybody know of any servers hosted in countries where all this stuff is legal? I wouldn’t mind registering on the servers where my illicit interests are legal.

    • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I see the decision you made as the ultimate end to this path you and lemmy world tread. At this rate all federations should defederate each other, or just shut down the whole fediverse. We can go back to individual hyper-specific forums on phbb again.

      I mean there is obviously a line between what should federated and what should not. But i feel the reasoning here is fundamentally different then the others chosen in the past.

    • Icaria@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t understand, what data from other instances is cached, exactly?

      And usenet has existed since before the Internet itself, has been used for piracy almost as long, and yet I don’t see many concerns there.

      • BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If Alice, a user of lemmy server A, subscribes to a piracy community on server B, all content of that piracy community will be pulled to, cached on, and served to Alice through their home instance, server A.

        All it takes is a single user subscribing to a community from another federated server to pull that entire community’s data into their home instance. It’s bad when it’s a copyright violation risk. It’s massively scary when it could happen with something like child porn, because now whoever is running the home server is storing and distributing it unknowingly.

    • captain_samuel_brady@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Eh. I’m a lawyer. I wouldn’t be afraid of the civil risk unless I was accepting donations. Suing regular people isn’t really a profitable endeavor. I’m more concerned about paying for the hosting and being subscribed to enough of the fediverse to have a representative instance.

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, but Rudd probably doesn’t have the expertise or resources to swat away people that knock on his door with threats of litigation.

        And there are a lot of dumb ass lawyers out there that have no problem lobbing threats and cease and desist over the wall. I know, I encounter them all the damn time.