Hi everyone,
I’ve been wondering about legal implications of self-hosting Lemmy. Isn’t it universally required in many countries to moderate the content that you host publicly? What happens when someone posts something illegal on your instance and you don’t won’t to bother with being a mod and just enjoy the technical aspects of it?
Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
If you don’t want to moderate, don’t let others sign up to your instance. That deals with pretty much all your legal issues.
For US-based people, register for DMCA notifications. This means if someone posts copyright infringing content, you get a message about it instead of your hosting provider, and you get to remove that content instead of your hosting provider removing your account.
Check about GDPR compliance. Part of that is fully deleting user content in a timely fashion when they ask. I’ve heard that Lemmy might not be good about that, but I’m not sure. If you have any EU users, you’ll need to comply.
If you want to run a large instance, you’ll need to have a plan regarding CSAM.
If you do moderate, use The Bad Space or shared block lists to defederate from the the most problematic instances. I’m not sure whether they’ve really made it to this general corner of the fediverse, though.
How reliable is The Bad Space? They don’t seem to give reasons or comments on why an instance was added.
For anyone who doesn’t know what ‘registering for DMCA notification’ means, you’re after https://www.copyright.gov/dmca-directory/
That said, there’s no particular requirement that a DMCA notice be sent to you even if you have a registered agent and some reporters will send it to the abuse contact for the IP netblock you’re hosted on regardless of registration, so you may want to make sure you understand what steps your provider may or may not take when they get a DMCA notice before you actually get a notice.