The instance owners do not wish to host potentially problematic content.

I will try to locate a more suitable instance.

  • mindbleach@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “We’re gonna be the instance for everybody! Not you. Not you. Not you either. Ew. Not you. Who let all this riff-raff into the room?”

    Between that and the constant downtime, this account might be short-lived.

    • Alteon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They are literally going through the same pains as any other social media sites that start getting big. Every social media site wants to be “all-inclusive” until you have to start worrying about content moderation and liability. Shit gets intense.

      As for the “downtime,” they’ve done posts about it. They are being constantly DDOS’ed by someone (assuming another defederated instance owner). And given your annoyance of it, it sounds like the DDOS is working as intended. The instance admins have done a fantastic job so far and I intend to wait it out.

      • mindbleach@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s no excuse for fumbling along like this is new. Better-run sites know what’s coming and stick close to their initial rules.

        If your site hosts pornographic drawings and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether that includes Bart Simpson, you are a fucking idiot.

        If your site involves politics and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether Nazis are welcome, you are a fucking idiot.

        If your site welcomes leftist counterculture and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether that includes making guns, smoking pot, or copying text, you are a fucking idiot.

        The DDOS is something I’ve gladly weathered, in light of the admins taking it as an opportunity to debug the codebase. But what they’ve posted in-between those updates is “yeah btw we banned another thing that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on 2015 reddit.” I’m not sure I want to stick around with that even if service was flawless.

    • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yeah fuck those instance owners for not taking on legal risk! We don’t pay them and they should pay for our legal fees out of respect for the content we generate (which is copywritten and could get the instance owner in legal trouble)!

      Edit: typos. Also, to explain: I just want y’all to consider the folks who keep the instances running and the legal risk they take. Some instances don’t want to take on the risk. It’s not a left/right thing, it’s a risk-assesment thing. Removing content that might get them in legal trouble doesn’t mean that the instance is taking a political, ethical or moral stance on the topic. It’s really weird to think otherwise. My point was that when the instance owners get a dmca takedown notice (doesn’t really matter what country, doesn’t really matter if theh own the rights to that content or not), they are faced with a choice: do nothing and get sued, possibly needing to shut down the free service as a result. Or, they can choose to remove the content.

      Conversational forums like lemmy are still places where links to pirated content can exist. I know people just talk about pirated content and that it’s moderated but hear me out: sometimes people get busy and fall behind. They could then end up with a lawsuit.

      To avoid this, a reasonable policy might be to just avoid the topic altogether. But that doesn’t make them right or left wing, it just makes them regular site admins without an unlimited amount of money or the desire to go off grid and on the run. Yeah, that’s the worst case scenario, my point simply being “free service run for long time if rules prevent legal threats to the service’s livelyhood” see: napster.

      • XIN@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        They have a right to be exclusive and we have a right to not like it.

      • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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        1 year ago

        Some jurisdictions are relatively more permissive than others, so the legal risk is not uniform. There will be some user flows until the instance landscape has settled.

        • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Which jurisdiction, mine or yours? Or what about the other person who will comment under this?

          Is that the 123.52.33.19 jurisdiction or the 95.32.122.99 jurisdiction?

          In other words, on the internet, how are you going to reliably change the content to fit the viewer’s jurisdiction?

          Just so people know, when you send a request to the internet, you’re not sending a request from your home address, you’re sending it from an IP address. Those IP addresses are not linked to City, State and Country, at least not reliably. MaxMind has a “GeoIP” database of “best guess” countries for IP addresses, but even if lemmy software were to implement geoIP gating like this, you’d have to taylor individual communities to individual jurisdictions and…

          NO ONE IS DOING THAT. Nor will they anytime soon, most likely.

          On the internet, it’s far easier to just shut the topic down, as was done with piracy. Sure, folks can share pirated content inside the “spiders” community if they wanted to, but that’s at least a little harder for rights holders to find than the “piracy” community. And by rights holders I mean companies that scan the web for keywords and link and send out automated DCMA takedown requests.

          Your point may stand in court but we’re on the internet and those instance owners are likely trying to avoid going to court.

          Again, instance owners aren’t instance owners because they want to be your political advocates in court, at their own expence, at the threat of the site being shut down.

          • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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            1 year ago

            The relevant part is the legislation of the instance hosting location and the degree of anonymity of the instance owner and his attitude.

            Hetzner is the very opposite of bulletproof hosting, the owner of lemmy.world is fully public and his attitude to potentially problematic content is on public record.

            • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              legislation of the instance hosting location

              Unless the hosting location is in the principality of SEALAND, and even if it is in SEALAND I think you’re going to be surprised about jurisdiction. Edward Snowden revealed a while back that all traffic crossing us borders is monitored. If the site is in the US, the server is within their jurisdiction and can easily be seized. If the site is outside of the US, traffic to that site is monitored from traffic originating from inside the US.

              What if the content is hosted overseas? Doesn’t matter, still sued

              The internet is global. Local jurisdiction for copyright infringement isn’t something I would hang my hat on. With greatly paid lawyers comes lots of power.

              the degree of anonymity

              read: the ability of the instance owner to shield themselves from legal trouble by trying to outrun it. (not a sustainable practice).

              his attitude

              read: the preferences of the instance owner to sheild themselves from legal trouble.

              bulletproof hosting

              read: the ability for users to post content that might get the instance owner in trouble with the expectation that it will not get the instance owner in trouble because it is legally-sound or otherwise outside of any jurisdiction of US law.

              the owner of lemmy.world is fully public

              read: the instance owner complies with the law.

              his attitude to potentially problematic content is on public record

              read: the instance owner’s preference for the instance owner to sheild themselves from legal trouble have been mentioned online. uh huh…

              • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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                1 year ago

                I don’t seem to be able to make myself understood. Once again: monitoring of (encrypted) connections is irrelevant. Or just getting the data from your own federating instance.

                Consider an anonymously paid bulletproof hosted lemmy instance. The admin is unknown, the hosters are not responsive to takedown requests, jurisdiction is neutral or welcoming. I can think of multiple such controversial instances that have survived for decades. It’s the gold standard, but silver or even bronze is far better than a jumpy self-censoring guy hosting stuff at a severely problem-averse hoster like Hetzner.

                If end users want to add protection layers to that it is their own prerogative and out of scope. EOT.

                • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  No I understand you quite clearly. You want to make the instance owner liable for your content. I am saying the instance owner does not want to be legally liable for your content. Do you seee how the world does not revolve around your wishes and desires? How much are y’all paying this instance owner to make it worth their while for taking on all this risk, zero monies? Yeah that won’t work, and the community is likely to be banned or defederated. Oh look, like it did.

                  I am just explaining the reality. You are explaining your desires.

                  Example: Some pedophiles started posting CSAM to lemmyshitpost, and now lemmyshitpost is down. Do you understand me yet?

        • Dodecahedron December@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          You’ve never heard of Copywrite law? Is libgen not a site for distrubiting copywritten content like text books?

          Look, I’m on the information wants to be free side of things, but I do know a bit about the law.

          Please, oh wise one, break down my stupidity and leave no detail out!

          • mindbleach@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You’ve never heard of Copywrite law?

            Google it.

            Don’t scoff. Copy-paste that term into any search engine. See what you get instead.

    • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      Yes, I’ve also made accounts on some other instances. Not made the jump to run my own yet, the code base is not yet sufficiently stable nor are the moderation tools yet there.

        • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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          1 year ago

          I know shrine from another place and used to trust him. However, among other things, he silently dropped privileges on other mod accounts on /r/libgen and /r/scihub. I wanted to point you to a pinned post of mine for the gory details, but that seems to be no longer there. I’m not going to check the mod log who cleaned up but just going to assume it was him.

          So, I no longer trust him to be a good steward of a community and will not work with him on any project.

    • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      I did not realize that the instance owners were so risk-averse. This means I need to research the final haven thoroughly before committing.

    • eleitl@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      You seem to see drama where there is none. It’s simply about finding a more suitable location. I could run an instance myself, but I don’t trust myself to make it sustainable enough.