Hi, reddit refugee here. I saw the rule in the main post stating that this instance will not allow NSFW content for now due to the legal ramifications & moderating needs. I 100% understand and agree with that decision, however, does this mean that I (as a user registered to sh.itjust.works) cannot subscribe to, read, or post in NSFW communities on other instances? Posts belong to a single community and communities belong to a single lemmy instance, correct? If my assumption here is correct, there’s no risk to sh.itjust.works from interacting with these external communities, so long as we dont try to host a new one here, right?
I am no lawyer, however I do not see a problem with subscribing to NSFW communities outside of this instance. I’d go as far as saying that should you want to contribute to these external communities you can do so as long as you are not using the built in image hosting service to store your content. There are external platforms such as redgifs that could be used to store this content as long as it fit within their TOS.
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Massive W.
A given instance can say no NSFW but other instances can allow it. If the two instances are federated together you can subscribe to, and view, whatever the other instance provides.
To add to this, when you post an image it is hosted on the instance you have an account with. So your instance admins may have an issue with that. The only way to know for sure is to ask them directly. I made an alt on !lemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com just to be safe, and it’s better to separate that stuff from your main account anyway imo.
Doesn’t that cause this instance to cache all the posts from that Community? Wouldn’t that violate the wishes of the owners of your instance, since they are now hosting the cache of the NSFW content?
Text is cached but images aren’t rehosted.
I’m still trying to figure out all this stuff too, but it’s people like yourself that help me understand it better. Thank you for the clear explanation, as I was also curious about this, along with OP
If I understand correctly the way the protocol works, when you federate to a community you are instructing your instance’s server (in this case sh.itjust.works) to start copying every post and comment that is posted on the target community. This would in turn mean that, if you federate with an NSFW community, the sh.itjust.works admin would start copying NSFW posts to his server, with all the legal repercussions of this.
Of course, if this was actually a problem for the admins they’d have turned off federation / put federation on allow list / would have defederated from a bunch of NSFW instances. Considering none of these are the case, I’d say you can chill and just subscribe to whatever community interests you.
