Selfhosted

While there is merit to your post, I will point out the obvious: your post is hosted on an instance named "lemmy world" and you are citing US enforcement codes and sections, but lemmy.world (the servers) do not reside inside the United States. Lemmy.world (the server) would be subject to the laws of the country in which it is hosted, the admin team would be subjected to the laws in the countries in which they reside, the community moderators would be subject to the laws in the countries they reside, and the lemmy.world users would be subject to the laws frrom where ever they reside.

So, you can't simply link to a writeup about some US regulations and assume it's going to be exactly the same everywhere and for everyone.

4chan exists and continue to thrive. That is enough proof that many Lemmy Mods are over reacting. Hiromoot is a one man show too.

I was selfhosting a lemmy instance just for myself, to be able to connect and post to other instances. I had no communities or users. I ended up shutting it down because at the end of the day, I just don't want stuff like CSAM making its way onto my home server because someone with ill intent bombarded a server I'm federated with. I still believe in the fediverse and lemmy in general, and no, I don't think I'm going to get raided and arrested. But the fear just outweighed the pleasure I got from my little selfhosting project. I'm happy that other instances are up and running, and that I can post from them. I'll also be excited to redeploy a personal server in the future when I feel that development has progressed enough that the risk to myself is low enough to still find pleasure in the project.

There should be a full write up from a lawyer - or, better yet, an organization like the EFF. Because lemmy.world is such a prominent instance, it would probably garner some attention if the people who run it were to approach them.

People would still have to decide what their own risk tolerances are. Some might think that even if safe harbor applies, getting swatted or doxxed just isn’t worth the risk.

Others might look at it, weigh their rights under the current laws, and decide it’s important to be part of the project. A solid communication on the specific application of S230 to a host of a federated service would go a long way.

I worked as a sys admin for a while in college in the mid-90s, and it was a time when ISPs were trying to get considered common carriers. Common carrier covers phone companies from liability if people use their service to commit crimes. The key provision of common carrier status was that the company exercised no control whatsoever over what went across their wires.

In order to make the same argument, the systems I helped manage had a policy of no policing. You could remove a newsgroup from usenet, but you couldn’t any other kind of content oriented filtering. The argument went that as soon as you start moderating, you’re now responsible for moderating it all. True or not, that’s the argument made and policy adopted on multiple university networks and private ISPs. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a company like facebook or reddit which have full control over their content. We’re talking things like the web in general, such as it was, and usenet.

Usenet is probably the best example, and I knew some BBS operators who hosted usenet content. The only BBS owners that got arrested (as far as I know) were arrested for being the primary host of illegal material.

S230 or otherwise, someone should try to get a pro bono from a lawyer (or lawyers) who know the subject.

Edit: Looks like EFF already did a write up. With the amount of concerned people posting on this optic, this link should be in every official reply and as a post in the topic.

For anyone who's uncomfortable about the possibility of serving CSAM from their instance, just block pictrs from serving any image by adding this to lemmy nginx config, at least until this pull request merged and included in the future lemmy version.

location ^~ /pictrs/ {
    return 404;
}

I think its also a good prompt, as a self hoster, to assess what services you are hosting and what kind of risk profile that exposes you to. Making yourself aware of any regulations or legal implications and their potential consequences (if any) may mean that self hosting a service becomes much less fun/cool and not worth it.

What does csam mean?

Also, are the images even federated? I know the current line of thinking is that they are, but I could not find them in my local pictrs volume. Not that I wanted to, mind you. But I looked and only saw one picture in there from the problematic time period, and it happened to be one of my user's avatars. And one of the CSAM posts federated with me, I know for a fact, because I saw the comments even though I couldn't see the picture (and I feel horrible for those users who saw it, some of them were obviously traumatized).

I'm keeping a close eye on my pictrs volume and really scrutinizing who I allow on my instance after this whole thing, but on the whole, I'm not overly concerned, even as a US-based self-hoster. I registered with the DMCA and will fully comply with any and all takedown requests, even silly ones like copyright. I don't have the finances or time for prolonged legal battles.

Edit: Figured it out. My pictrs container didn't have an external network definition, so it was timing out while retrieving external images.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #97 for this sub, first seen 31st Aug 2023, 13:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

CP is something that's prevented me from hosting imaging solutions in the past, out of risk-avoidance so I've given it a lot of thought over the years. The lack of support from Cloudflare hasn't helped, and making it USA-only weakens it as a general solution. That said, I'll still run some sites via Cloudflare because I'm certain it tracks the content regardless without the mandate to enforce or alert, and that tracking may help lead to the original source [pure opinion here with hard facts, but I use CF for other reasons].

Now that I want to host fediverse things safely, it's still a concern. I'm not in the US, I'm in the UK and host in Canada. Doesn't matter greatly. They'd still take all my equipment while they investigate IF they had sufficient evidence to charge. But they WON'T because the CP is attributable to someone else. The main takeaway from all of this, for me, is to NEVER take backups of actual content, only settings/accounts. Holding archives is dangerous because only I would have access to their contents.

Defederate aggressively, block paths as needed, keep logs, don't run it from home, etc etc. Keeping records gets most folk out of sticky legal situations.

The law also expands criminal and civil liability to classify any online speaker or platform that allegedly assists, supports, or facilitates sex trafficking as though they themselves were participating “in a venture” with individuals directly engaged in sex trafficking.

Yeah this part worries me. Those who self host and end up with CSAM unknowingly from federated instances could be charged as if they were the malicious actors themselves.

The root issue here, when your local police department knocks down your door with guns drawn in the US, after you were anonymously reported to the feds-

They aren't asking questions. If your children don't get a flashbang to the face during the surprise entry into your home, and your dog doesn't get shot, you are doing good.

Here in the US, you goto jail first. You get somebody putting fingers up your ass looking for drugs first. You have to post your own bail.

THEN, when you finally get a court date months later, THEN, you can make your case as to why there was CASM content, hosted at your IP.

It is NOT WORTH THE RISK!