When this instance first started, I don’t think it was fully anticipated how large it would get. The place where this instance was when I first stepped up as admin was wholly unsustainable long term. There was little direction as to what the instance’s intentions as a website were, and the specific intentions it seemed to lean towards (being a sort of reddit 2.0) is not something we have the ability to handle. Neither monetarily nor legally.
The expectations that this instance specifically would be replacing reddit nsfw content entirely is not realistic, and the expectations that have been had for what all of lemmy is capable of has been much higher than what the backend side of things is at right now. Rome was not built in a day, and the same is true for communities of this nature. We are utilizing a platform based on a philosophy that hasn’t been widely used outside of email since the early Internet, while now having to work the laws and limitations that the current Internet now presents as well. It’s an experiment, and just like all other communities we have made mistakes and are trying our best while figuring this out together. This is not a business, we are not shareholders, we are simply passionate volunteers.
Right now, our team has been paying attention to concerns and feedback that have been raised. We are currently actively engaged in a discussion of what the next steps are from here. My hasty implementation of the current restrictive content policy was not something to do long term but an attempt to reign in a community with what felt to have little restrictions and many issues popping up. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of managing a community like this. The current policy as it stands right now, has been a band aid while we discuss further how to move forward. And we have been.
And thankfully we have a much bigger back-end team than before. What has helped the most to provide insight is that we have a back-end team member who has active experience in hosting adult websites within the legal span of the law. We also have backend team members who are helping to build mod tools not just for lemmyNSFW but with active collaboration with others across instances as well.
As we have discussed rule changes and throwing things at the wall, our biggest aspect has been determining if we are on the same page as a team. Unfortunately, a now previous back-end team member decided that he was not. And that’s ok. However last night, instead of moving forward and deciding that our ethos as a team moving forward isn’t for them there was a post that was made that compiled our original rough draft for new content guidelines and attempted to pass them off as that is going to be our full go to as a community. It isn’t. We are discussing things and hashing things out as a team still but have made significant progress moving beyond what was discussed. When changes occur, we will make a post clarifying such changes. We ask for patience, please.
It’s more than just hosting. I am no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that the owner of the website is liable for its content regardless of where the site is hosted. I think lemmynsfw’s admin team is made up of US citizens for this reason, as the US is much less strict on online pornography laws than many Western countries.
Of course, you can try to host “anonymously” in a country that doesn’t care what it hosts. Torrent websites have been working this way for years. But every now and then a team of motivated lawyers/prosecutors manages to take one down and sometimes the owners do a stint in prison and/or exile themselves to somewhere without extradition treaties. The risk might arguably be lower with pornography (if you stay away from the very illegal stuff like loli), but it’s not zero.
I think hosting anonymously is not necessary if it were to be hosted in the US. They go after torrent sites because of the illegal nature of the content hosted there.
But that’s a good point about the domain owner, iirc yay is outside of the US. He could however transfer the domain.
It’s a shame there’s not a way to remain federated with a server and not have their content cache on yours. Or only caching encrypted data that’s encrypted in pieces rather than full unencrypted data.
Uh… source? These people here seem to agree with me.
To take an extreme example, if I was to host CP on Afghani servers with Taliban approval, my country’s courts would very much put me in a dark, dark jail for several decades at least. “It’s on foreign servers!” is not a “get out of jail free” card. One might argue that, in many cases, hosting abroad probably does obfuscate things to a point that the judicial system doesn’t bother about mildly illegal stuff that would require significant international cooperation to fully prosecute… at least for now.
Woah woah, no one is talking about CP here, I have said in above comments, I am also against hosting Loli and shoata, and very very much against CP, we are talking about hosting a US server with only things that are not illegal in the US.
One of the points of contention was what is illegal in European countries, with the example of the rape_hentai. They often have legislation that outlaws depictions of illegal sexual acts, even if animated.
I’m not saying that CP was on the table, I was just using an extreme example to illustrate my point. Because, legally, CP and rape hentai are both illegal to host and the point is that hosting illegal content abroad doesn’t shield me from liability if I do that while, myself, living in a country that forbids it.
CP on the internet is in a weird place because it’s the only illegal content that has some kind of coherent action taken against it… for now. But, legally, and I cannot stress that enough, rape hentai is illegal even if governments aren’t currently taking meaningful actions to prevent the production/facilitation/viewing of such content in countries where it is illegal.
It is not illegal in the US was my point. Loli and Shoata aren’t even illegal in the US. Animated content is treated very differently than really images/video here.
My point was someone else could host it in the US.