this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Er, what laws are we talking about here? You do realize that instances are run out of many different countries with wildly differing laws on speech, right? Also that very, very few countries (probably zero) are going to have laws on the books about fediverse instances federating with one another?
Honestly, I'm fine with the owners of various instances making decisions to federate or not federate with others. That sort of decentralized control is one of the benefits of federation. There is no single point of failure for the whole ecosystem. If one instance's admin goes off the rails, it's easy for people to know about and shift to a different instance. Sure, it also means that an admin can go off the rails and start defederating anything and everything they don't like. Again, that's not a problem with lots of well known instances out there for us to choose from. And it means that those folks with niche interests can build their own safe spaces to discuss their interests, without every third post being "haha, yur dum!".
If you really don't like the way your current instance is being run, then spin up your own and follow your own rules. Maybe you're right and that's what everyone really wants. And maybe not, and you'll quickly find yourself a community of one. But, let's drop the talk of "legally protected" when this sort of thing has nothing to do with the laws of any country.
Countries have laws both protecting people who host content provided by third parties and imposing certain responsibilities on them when they become aware of illegal content hosted on their servers. Some of them, like Germany's NetzDG impose specific procedures for reporting (though no Lemmy server is large enough for NetzDG to apply). US laws about child pornography, for example are very specific about removal and reporting requirements, come with a risk of prison, and can include things that are legal other places such as cartoon drawings.
Laws don't need to specifically address whether the content arrived via a federation mechanism or a user uploading it directly, only what a server owner must do once they're aware of illegal content on their server.