Nope. If the site was about knitting I would have said the same thing.

Respectfully, there is legally no pornography on the site according to the jurisdiction it operates in. At best it is obscene, and it rightfully has an 18+ policy on registered users.

This node maintains the fact that it does not allow pornography, and that all local content has artistic value.

Because baraag.net contains no pornographic images depicting ‘Actual human beings’ within the meaning and definitions of 18 USC §2257 OR 18 USC §2257A, the admin of this node has been advised by counsel that they cannot maintain records pursuant to those statutes.

You can try and malign them as if they’re trying to “disguise” themselves to fit into society, but at the end of the day it is literally just people drawing what they like to draw. Admins are free to defederate them, they usually don’t mind it since laws in most places don’t align with common sense anyway, but throwing shade at a server that minds it’s own business is kinda pathetic.

All big fediverse instances are funded by users.

This isn’t true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to fediverse.observer/list

• mstdn.jp, pawoo.net, mastodon.cloud are run out of pocket (by the same owner (!!!)).
• misskey.io is partially funded by ads.
• Funding for mastodon.social and mastodon.online is co-mingled with the funding for Mastodon the software project
• baraag.net barely has the funds to secure enough capacity for the number of users it serves (registrations have been closed for the past year)
• The admin of mstdn.social was apparently short on rent this month? (!!!)
• daystorm and pravda don’t count because their numbers are spoofed, which leaves mastodon.world in the number 10 spot, which I think can count itself is being truly user-funded and sustainable.

They didn’t bother outlawing possession of CP until 2014 edition.cnn.com/2014/06/…/japan-child-porn-law Distribution was legal right up until 1999

Under the new law, people in possession of child pornography have one year to dispose of it before they risk prosecution.

Very considerate!

How have you determined these communities are no longer a legal concern?

The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.

3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.

Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.

In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.

Here’s a question for you. Do you think it’s okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space …

Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.

On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.

On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.

The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.

Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.

You’re conflating tagging a post as public so that it is publicly accessible as being the same thing as consenting to being indexed in a search engine.

Google and Bing’s crawlers can find and index Unlisted posts just as easily as any other.

Just because there are 3rd-party search engines that don’t respect people’s privacy, doesn’t mean that a 1st party search engine should follow their example.