The money part - they’re open with their finances: https://opencollective.com/beehaw

It wasn’t set up to be decentralized power though. The structure was digital fiefdoms with admins and mods on an instance with power over their local communities… and yet difficult to censor content that was posted into it. But you can still get banned from a community or an instance or have an instance get defederated.

The structure doesn’t really solve any of the problems of centralization of power (as shown with Lemmy.world) - its to make it hard to shut down what someone wants to say on some instance’s community if the admin and mods are ok with it. And even if the instance you are on defederates and blocks them, they’re still there and people can sign up there and participate there.

This is Reddit with censorship resistance (no way to completely kick off /r/the_donald from Lemmy if they can stand up their own server) - not reddit with decentralized power.

Getting mod tools added to Lemmy is low priority for the Lemmy devs. Rust, while being a very hyped language, has many fewer people who can work with it at the scale than other main stream languages.

The issue also extends to moderated content that has been federated out to other instances that don’t share the moderation ideals that Beehaw has. (The Lemmy software is an awkward fit for their ideals, and federation is something that doesn’t match their ideals at all - less of an issue when there were only a handful of instances that were mostly defederated - but with new ones coming online for the past 3 months and federation by default this made things awkward).

There are other open source alternatives that have better moderation tooling. For what it’s worth, here’s an old version of Reddit - https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit (the language is Python and JavaScript - see the bit about Rust above).

For Beehaw, spinning up an instance of old reddit and growing that to be their own community is probably an easier task than fixing federation and moderation in Lemmy to what suits their needs.

I always felt the fediverse is designed in a very awkward way… the way all the content needs to be mirrored, not only does it make it hard to update / modify / delete content, but also it makes it so other instances have to host content from all the other instances they want their users to access…

This was an implementation choice for Lemmy (and Mastodon) but isn’t required by the protocol. It’s a trade off of caching data locally to render vs network traffic. For other systems where its Activity Pub - think FourSquare check ins ( https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ ) or “a new video has been posted” or “a new blog entry has been posted” ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ ) - it works fine.

Layering a microblogging system on top of it where you want faster rendering time (and lower network traffic - unless you’re hosting a popular site) is awkward. Trying to layer a link aggregator with votes and comments on top of it with local caching of data… and you’re getting some of the problems that Lemmy is demonstrating.

Reddit on top of activity pub is much more awkward than “link sharing and commenting on top of activity pub” because it doesn’t have to be Reddit.

Part of the caching data everywhere is part of the original design intention of the developers ( https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/05-censorship-resistance.html ). And so while this functionality isn’t a mistake (from the standpoint of the developers), its implications weren’t fully considered when the total number of posts for years was ¹/₁₀th of what was posted in the past two months.

Child Sexual Abuse Material.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/csam-scanning/ (and that’s a perfectly SFW page to visit that gives you some background on the how to scan and what is done when a match is found)

You drastically over estimate the number of people who were creating content on Reddit leaving for Lemmy.

The entire population of Lemmy is smaller than a mid sized cat sub on Reddit and the only content that is being reliably generated is memes.

Yes, a few subs did have their communities split, and some left permanently. But if you think Reddit corporate got at all bothered by Lemmy’s MAU numbers… no, they’re not that great.

A bunch of mods did indeed stop activity on Reddit, but all in all there’s been no practicable drop in volume.

Putting it behind a 3rd party API that has registration ensures that the 3rd party that is under contract to report it does so. It isn’t enough just to block it - it needs to be reported too. Google and Cloudflare report it to the proper authorities.

Additionally, if it was open source, people trying to evade it could just download the open source tool and tweak their images until they come back without getting flagged.

This is the system that the EFF is endorsing - the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit for defending civil liberties.

For people hosting instances, however, it can also mean some legal risk. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to mitigate that risk – if you plan ahead. To help people do that, this guide offers an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations.

Two important notes: (1) This guide is focused on legal risks that flow from hosting other people’s content, under U.S. law. In general, the safe harbors and immunities discussed below will not protect you if you are directly infringing copyright or defaming someone. (2) Many of us at EFF are lawyers, but we are not YOUR lawyers. This guide is intended to offer a high-level overview of U.S. law and should not be taken as legal advice specific to your particular situation.

…

The safe harbor doesn’t apply automatically. First, the safe harbor is subject to two disqualifiers: (1) actual or “red flag” knowledge of specific infringement; and (2) profiting from infringing activity if you have the right and ability to control it. The standards for these categories are contested; if you are concerned about them, you may wish to consult a lawyer.

Second, a provider must take some affirmative steps to qualify: Designate a DMCA agent with the Copyright Office.

By registering a DMCA agent for your site, you get to tell people who are saying “there’s copyrighted material on your site that you are hosting” to fill out the proper forms that includes their name and address and a bunch more information that they are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. If they don’t have that, then you get tell them to pound sand.

This is a much better alternative for protecting a site than talking to lawyers when you don’t have the ability to rely upon section 230 as a defense for hosting user generated content.

I am for protecting the fediverse from over zealous copyright holders and copyright trolls with every legal tool available. That also comes with following the laws that exist and trying to mitigate any danger to the staff and users.

Lemmy.world is a large instance with a big target painted on it and probably many fewer lawyers than Reddit has on retainer. As such, removing piracy and copyright infringement from a site are reasonable steps to make sure that while DDOSs can take down the site, it will be harder for lawyers to do so.

Is the server admin responsible for federated data stored in the database and accessible via a URL on their instance?

This is a question that the admins of lemmy.world would rather not have to answer and so were proactive in removing /c’s and defederating from instances that could cause them problems.

For a United States hosted instance, reading https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer is probably a good idea (and spending the $6 to register someone as a DMCA agent who gets the copyright complaints and can follow the process for dealing with them to ensure the instance maintains its safe harbor status).

Are admins responsible for the content that shows up in all? And from a legal perspective, if they were investigated for hosting and distributing copyrighted material what would their liability be?

User bans and community bans and warnings don’t work too well across instances for managing the content on all… unless you want to go about warning and banning users on your site to not subscribe to content on other instances that would lead to problems.

(edit)

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assitance in obtaining it.

The admins could play whack-a-mole with the /c’s hosted there that are pro piracy or otherwise not honoring copyright… though that’s kind of the point of the site: “Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Disregard Copyrights”. At some point, it’s going to be more work doing that than it is worth it to have their content federated to lemmy.world.

What other resorts can they go to?