I mean, it’s not on their server. It’s hosted on dbzer0.
Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
I’m surprised the major Lemmy servers even permit piracy related content in the first place. Half the Fediverse seems to be hosted in Germany, probably one of the worst countries to host piracy related content.
The .world team should definitely make a statement before banning stuff just to avoid this kind of drama, but piracy communities are not worth the moderation hassle and legal risk for a silly side project like Lemmy.
If I were you, I wouldn’t expect the same privacy protections Reddit provides for their users when copyright owners start sending legal threats. These instances barely collect enough donations to cover server costs, nobody is going to pay an expensive lawyer to protect your IP address if your server gets sued.
Adanisi@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It’s 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that’s not exactly great for a piracy community either.
Image loading example
Image I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could’ve been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.
rimu@piefed.social 6 months ago
Oof, yeah that's bad...
can@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Neat. Has anyone brought this up to the devs here or on github before?
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
I’m not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don’t know about this.
The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that’s not implemented.
Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I’m not sure why this feature was removed again. I can’t find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you’re curious.
nutsack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
you could safeguard against this on the client side by not loading images
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ayo what the fuck how’d you do that
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.
DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Got the state correct 👍
nutsack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
i really wish there were a way to disable images with some of these fancy lemmy clients for android
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
If you use Sync, there’s this setting you can toggle to disable embedded images. I’m not sure if this protects against network requests, but I think it should? If you disable the, images are represented as links instead.
can@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
But of they federated they’ll be hosting a copy.
Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have limitless money to pay lawyers
castlebravo404@lemmynsfw.com 6 months ago
You might not have to pay damages. But you’re probably going to have to pay a hefty legal fee not to pay damages.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?
I was thinking the same thing, as a legal question.
In the Fediverse, who’s the source/target for the law to look at, the originator, or all the cached copies on other servers?
nutsack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Then let me instance doesn’t actually host any pirated content, does it? It’s just information about pirated content and where to find it, right? Who the fuck cares about this
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 months ago
Links to pirated content have been deemed illegal in various jurisdictions. That said, the piracy community on Lemmy doesn’t seem to do much more than complain about DRM, so I guess the risk shouldn’t be that high?
Still, the best way to avoid annoying letters from lawyers is to avoid risky communities. Hosting anything related to piracy, gambling, porn, or crime is just a pain, even more so than hosting normal stuff.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah, we should run this shit through Somalia, they don’t give a f u c k.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Yeah people are really weird about this. They want a free distributed forum hosted by small admins, but don’t want those individuals to take basic legal precautions? Piracy might be moral, but it’s a liability which will absolutely impact the viability of servers in many places. Grow up.