Mastodawn

Aaron Mackey Dec 21, 2022

ICYMI: A primer on the various legal issues that can arise if you decide to run your own Mastodon instance. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer

A growing number of people are experimenting with federated alternatives to social media like Mastodon, either by joining an “instance” hosted by someone else or creating their own instance by running the free, open-source software on a server they control. (See more about this movement and joining...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Other than scale, is there much that's different between hosting a mastodon instance and hosting a blog that allows 3rd-parties to write comments that include web links? (w/r/t legal issues)

While reading this (well-written) primer I kept wondering about distinguishing mastodon legal issues from blog legal issues.

It's likely there's something significant I've not considered.

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Aaron Mackey

@crecente You're right that many of the issues are the same for any service that hosts others' content. EFF's blogger's guide written a long time ago covers many of the same issues: https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal

Though some of the privacy issues could be different depending on how much info the blogger collects about commenters versus a Mastodon instance.

Legal Guide for Bloggers

Whether you're a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you've been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post. Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Very good point about the privacy issues. I imagine more info would likely be captured w/ Mastodon vs a standard WordPress blog. Time to dig into the admin options to see how best to limit that.

Thank you for the info! And thanks for the work that EFF is doing.