I just realised that the MegaLinks subreddit wouldn’t have had to close up if it was selfhosted on the fediverse, the idea of independent servers for each major sub is fascinating.
That being said, I’m sure it would have ran into new issues.
Edit: Changed ML to MegaLinks.
What’s an ML?
MegaLinks was a subreddit which shared DDL for shows & movies. They relocated to a forum which has since hopped domains.
…
Independent servers still need to follow the law. lemmy.dbzer0.com is hosted in Germany which means that German IP law applies. Also, since .com is an American TLD, American law can also apply if the admins ignore DMCA takedowns and such (the domain could be seized, for example).
You can probably make your Lemmy instances practically untraceable to facilitate piracy if you run it in an area that doesn’t care about piracy with an appropriate domain (in Russia, maybe in China) or if you run it on Tor; there’s no technical reason why a federated set of Lemmy servers wouldn’t be able to go through Tor except that most Lemmy servers wouldn’t be able to interact with them.
I was thinking it’s only a matter of userbase before a piracy Lemmy instance gets a DMCA, their domain registrar and/or host would be the thing that can’t be avoided.
Most likely we will just see mirrored instances like with torrent indexers.
Deletes federate, so a takedown on one Lemmy would propagate throughout the network. You can hack that out, of course, but most instances that don’t propagate deletions will get defederated from all the normal Lemmy servers.
This instance is hosted in Germany, one of the countries with the strictest anti-piracy laws? Seems like a very risky decision (I’m aware that a lot of the good and affordable hosting providers are German).
That shouldn’t be a problem as long as German law is followed. I don’t believe it’s illegal to link to illegal websites in Germany, so unless someone actually uploads illegal content here, I don’t think it should be any more of a problem than r/piracy ever was.
Also, the host (Contabo) may be a German company, but they do sell services in other countries as well. Based on traceroutes I think the server is located in Germany but theoretically it could be a UK/USA/Singapore/Japan/Australia based server. The latency I’m seeing between me and the server probably rule out most of those countries but UK servers are still a possibility.
