Update: I contacted with current big owners, other older friends and lastly from some friends from here. Mostly all of them living in US so they don’t want/can’t host it. So I’ll keep hosting without being on moderation side. @gavi@lemmynsfw.com will post about details I guess. @gavi@lemmynsfw.com is the new top admin.
As you know, it has been 2 weeks since I opened the instance and it has grown quite a lot. Likewise, the time I have to devote to this work has increased a lot.
I’m dealing with lemmynsfw more than my IRL job right now :D This is bothering me. Also, having an NSFW instance instead of a normal instance makes things much more difficult. If you remember; I had my biggest scale fuck up with the post “we allow loli content” :) This situation wore me out. Also a lot of problems are bothering me, both as a software and as a community.
That’s why I’m thinking of transferring the instance and the domain to a person I trust. Who can maintain the deployments and also know this stuff. I will also roll over any donations made, excluding the current month’s expenses.
I’m sorry if I’ve upset anyone. That’s all from me.
Hey just a quick FYI, if anyone here in the US is thinking of taking this instance over, I would strongly recommend becoming extremely familiar with correctly implementing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and related laws. And I don’t mean just reading it and thinking “I am a smart person, I get this now”. I mean learning how large social media sites and their T&S teams actually implement it for real. Otherwise you will very possibly go to a PMITA prison and wind up on the sex offender registry.
I’m not messing with you. The feds do not fuck around with this stuff.
This is an interesting point. I am reading this from a different instance. I wonder if merely federating with this instance from a US based instance requires the same thing.
Well, there’s a discussion on the lemmy github that sort of touches on this issue, because right now instances cache federated content. So let’s say somebody posts a bunch of illegal content here, and before it gets nuked by mods it gets federated to beehaw, which caches the material. Now beehaw is technically hosting illegal material, and they may not even realize it.
Honestly would make more sense if everyone defederated it for this reason. If you want lemmy.nsfw, go to lemmy.nsfw. That way none of the other instances have that risk. And I personally would be fine if NSFW didn’t show up randomly in my feed. When I want to see it I can swap profiles or switch instances.
American law is honestly just deeply convoluted and annoying. Having to take into account the 50 mini countries in a trench coat hyper-specific legalities is so fun!
Can you give us a quick ELI5 on that?
I’m not familiar but I thought as long as you weren’t producing, looking for, or storing, you were good.
Also if you are based in us and host in let’s say Afghanistan does it still apply? (This is just curiosity without wanting to read and understand pounds of legal jargon, if it’s too annoying to explain dw bout it)
When I say section 230 it’s actually shorthand for a much bigger tangle of rules: the CDA, the DMCA, SESTA/FOSTA, 18 USC 2258A and sometimes even 2257 regulatory compliance, and I’m probably missing a bunch.
Basically, if somebody posts illegal material on your site, be it copyrighted material, underage stuff, defamation, true threats, pro-terrorism stuff, advertisement of sexual services, revenge porn, snuff, etc you are not on the hook for that stuff in either civil or criminal courts as long as you jump through some very specific hoops both ahead of time and after if and when you become aware or should have become aware of such material (except the sexual services thing, which is a specific carve out due to sesta and fosta. Plus what qualifies for advertisement of sexual services can be a tricky issue.)
These hoops are very specific, and your jump through them can be triggered in a number of different ways, and both the hoops and the triggers can be moving targets depending on recent interpretations of the rules, court precedent, etc. Some people think that this is not real because a lot of places are able to skate under the radar for a long time which breeds a false sense of complacency, but as soon as the feds come a-knocking you better have all your papers in order or they drop the hammer on you. This can include both massive civil and criminal liabilities depending on the specific nature of the content and where it comes from.
And this isn’t even including any of the credit card compliance stuff, which means if you want to take donations or payments to your platform using any service that takes credit cards there are extremely onerous burdens of record-keeping and content management you need to follow well over and above anything the government requires.
Your “producing, looking for, or storing” conditions are not correct. Producing, obviously, yes, on a number of different levels. Looking for, actually no, you’re allowed to look for all you want. It’s if you find it that you’re in trouble, but the looking itself is fine. I mean it’ll be exhibit 2 in the criminal case against you because it proves intent, but if you look but don’t find you’re actually ok in most cases. “Storing” is very complicated. Did you know that you’re storing it? If you did, did you report it? If you did, how are you storing it, who has access to it, when did you report it, who did you report it to, and what format was your report? If you didn’t know, should you have known? Did someone report it to you? Etc etc etc.
TL;DR: GET A GOOD LAWYER AND DO WHAT THEY SAY.
Re: your afghan example, the short answer is yes, because the US government has jurisdiction over you as a US person. Even if you’re hosting the material in Afghanistan, if you have direct control over it then it is your material. Now from a practical point of view, getting an Afghan ISP to cooperate with an FBI subpoena may be a pretty tall order, but always remember that the feds have effectively unlimited resources and unlimited time to crush you like a bug if they want to.
Kind of concerning that looking for certain stuff is just fine, but I guess searching for narcotics is also perfectly legal.
One more question and I’ll leave your expertise be, if someone ran this forum negligently and were in the US, got raided and found to be negligently hosting (received reports of) some revenge porn, snuff, and cp, what kind of charge/years are they going to get? Generic distribution charges? Distribution with some sort of modifier? Seems like something they would have a special charge for but I could see it just being distro.
Thank you for the immaculate reply/breakdown, top tier reply.
The law doesn’t actually care about hosting as much as some people think that it does. The law cares about whether you are providing the material, and whether you’re hosting it or not is often immaterial to that question. To what level linking or embedding something counts as providing it is something that you don’t want to have to have your lawyer argue before a judge, because sometimes it’ll go your way but a lot of times it won’t, and either way you’re going to be paying your lawyer bajillions of dollars.
This instance isn’t my jam but an instance like this should really have a team behind it. That is a lot to start but once it is set it becomes immensely easier. Consider it, but it also is respectable to pass it off. Good luck.
Good luck with everything and thanks for starting this instance!
This is overkill, just don’t host anything you aren’t comfortable with, and let people go make their own for anything you aren’t. That’s the entire point of defederated design. Ignore the idiots who think this is reddit and are screaming about censorship and let them go deal with the headaches involved by making their own places. Signed a fellow sys admin of many years who actually knows what this is like.
❤️ Best wishes man
As a heads up, I am more than willing to help with the front admin stuff, backend just isn’t my expertise. If someone is willing to do the backend more I can do more front end stuff. I’m experienced with management of large communities and would be comfortable approaching some of the current pressing issues in a transparent way as well as opening up some discussions with other instance admins to try and address their concerns. I’m honestly just approaching things the same way I did when dealing with a large minecraft server. Horny adults are just grown up feral teenagers, I guess.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind helping with some of the admin load as well. Honestly, I think a space like this is important. I also have a fair amount of experience in the professional NSFW field, on the production and distribution side, so I’m at least familiar with a lot of the issues.
To be clear, I am in no way volunteering to own or host this instance. I absolutely can’t handle that level of hassle right now. But admin stuff, I’m down.
I also think that if somebody does take it over, we really need to have a larger discussion with everyone about transparency, mission, administration etc. Like is this going to be a community, or is it going to be a fiefdom? It’s really hard to have both.
I agree. Presenting a united front within the admin team is likely the best way to move forward from here, as well as to best move forward and address some recent problems. I think communities like these are important, specifically well managed NSFW communities. NSFW communities are going to exist regardless, but careful coordinated moderation really needs to be a priority to make it a space that fosters content that can exist in a legal and safe fashion. I feel also if this community is going to survive and maintain federation with other instances, there needs to be a means of establishing direct communication with other instance admins. I’ve reached out to some yiffit admins today to try and create a line of communication at least on that end. I think generally though that instance admins even outside of lemmynsfw need to coordinate together regardless and have open lines of communication to make sure their communities are interacting in healthy ways as well. That open line of communication between instance management helped mastodon stabilize as a community when a bunch of users flooded in.
