In a recent post, I made the case for why the Fediverse, with it's many thousands of instances would be impractical for billionaires to 'take down', in the same way that billionaires have successfully bought-out, or otherwise taken down other centralized social media/news platforms. This I think is true, in terms of the Fediverse's resiliency to the power of just money being thrown, but vulnerability remains. Specifically, I am concerned about recent government regulation that has already proven to be effective in closing down Fediverse instances and deterring others from even spinning up an instance.
I'm no legal professional, so excuse me if I say anything that is wrong or doesn't make sense. Anecdotally, I've seen a bunch of posts across the Fediverse about how they are closing down an instance thanks to the UK's Online Safety Act (2023). Similarly, it seems like the US bill (KOSA) could have similar effects? From what I understand, there is some new liability if your server hosts certain content and given how many Fediverse servers operate, caching content locally from other servers, there introduces a vulnerability by which a malicious actor could spam the Fediverse with something "bad"/illegal which would then be stored/cached across a large swath of the Fediverse which could expose these instance admins to legal liability.
Not good. And as someone who runs an instance themselves, I certainly don't want to open myself up to legal attack / prosecution just because some A-hole out there decides to spam me with illegal pictures or w/e.
So my question to the Fediverse, and to those that build the platforms we use here is, how can we re-architect the platforms and protocols to better protect ourselves? What do instance admins need to know about this threat? Someone smarter than me, please weigh in! 
#askfedi #legal #fediverse
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