The creator of Newgrounds has considered adding ActivityPub support to join the fediverse but is worried it would make their hosting fees untenable by “serving files to millions of people on third party apps“. Can anyone with more knowledge on how this works help them?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1537550/3#bbspost27933331_post_text
Having Newgrounds on the Fediverse would be incredible. Newgrounds has a huge art community, many features not available on any platform and has been around the longest (1999)
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Generally, if you add contact info for law enforcement and copyright owners, you’re not liable for content hosted on your server, as long as you take appropriate action when notified.
What that action means differs. For some countries, that means “wipe the data without a trace and inform the police”. For others, you need to collect evidence and submit that to the police, or have the police access your server to collect their own evidence. In some jurisdictions, you’re allowed to verify that CSAM reports are factually correct and action needs to be taken, in others you’re obligated to trust the government and never ever look at those files.
You’re not going to jail over this, but it’s going to be really annoying to have to explain the Fediverse and how server-to-server communication means you don’t know what user uploaded the files to the police every couple of months.
I could also see this turning into a form of DoS attack. I’m sure there’s very little leeway in ignoring “bad faith” reports so if you have an instance you could be responsible for investigating thousands of reports per day. And if you take the safe route and remove anything that’s reported, until deemed safe, you might as well turn off your instance.