this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
42 points (76.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43796 readers
754 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Er, what laws are we talking about here? You do realize that instances are run out of many different countries with wildly differing laws on speech, right? Also that very, very few countries (probably zero) are going to have laws on the books about fediverse instances federating with one another?
Honestly, I'm fine with the owners of various instances making decisions to federate or not federate with others. That sort of decentralized control is one of the benefits of federation. There is no single point of failure for the whole ecosystem. If one instance's admin goes off the rails, it's easy for people to know about and shift to a different instance. Sure, it also means that an admin can go off the rails and start defederating anything and everything they don't like. Again, that's not a problem with lots of well known instances out there for us to choose from. And it means that those folks with niche interests can build their own safe spaces to discuss their interests, without every third post being "haha, yur dum!".
If you really don't like the way your current instance is being run, then spin up your own and follow your own rules. Maybe you're right and that's what everyone really wants. And maybe not, and you'll quickly find yourself a community of one. But, let's drop the talk of "legally protected" when this sort of thing has nothing to do with the laws of any country.
Countries have laws both protecting people who host content provided by third parties and imposing certain responsibilities on them when they become aware of illegal content hosted on their servers. Some of them, like Germany's NetzDG impose specific procedures for reporting (though no Lemmy server is large enough for NetzDG to apply). US laws about child pornography, for example are very specific about removal and reporting requirements, come with a risk of prison, and can include things that are legal other places such as cartoon drawings.
Laws don't need to specifically address whether the content arrived via a federation mechanism or a user uploading it directly, only what a server owner must do once they're aware of illegal content on their server.