Don’t blame you, but I’m pretty sure this is the intent of the attackers. This is a takedown method.

Lemmy needs an attorney (or several) to outline what exactly is afforded by safe harbor provisions. I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice, but having fought against the application of safe harbor provisions being used as an excuse by companies worth tens to hundreds of billions of dollars as an excuse to not moderate, I know just a little about them.

When all of this had just started to really get rolling - back in the early 90s - ISPs (including institutions like universities) made the argument that they are common carriers. That is, the phone company isn’t responsible if someone makes terroristic or other criminal plans over the phone, because they are a common carrier. They simply carry communication, but disavow any ability to police it. ISPs argued for, and for the most part received, a common carrier type of status.

A couple of things have changed since then. First, in classic “you don’t fuck with the money” style, we saw DMCA and other laws come about since then. Second, services started taking more responsibility for their data - first by hosting it and then deciding what to serve to whom in what order. Both of those depart from the common carrier argument, but additional safe harbor laws were written that do a carve out for companies that perform a reasonable level of due diligence, eg by responding to takedown notices.

Lemmy is far closer to usenet or email than it is to reddit. There is no central service, but rather individual files that are synchronized between servers via an algorithm that is content-neutral.

Back in the Elder Days I was working in my university’s computer labs, and we were explicitly instructed that we could not (for instance) stop people from browsing porn in the labs because once you start policing content you could be on the hook to police all of it. I was and remain skeptical that this was a serious legal interpretation as opposed to someone who doesn’t actually understand the laws doing their best. On the other hand, common carrier principles do seem to say that if you’re just serving up a protocol, even if you’re hosting the files locally (like usenet), you don’t have the ability to detect offending content.

tl;dr - EFF or someone needs to weigh in on this question

Hi there

Hey, just wanted to provide some important info about Lemmy Handshake since it’s mentioned here. Maybe too late, but oh well, I just got the app built and ran.

So, first thing, despite the readme mentioning saved posts and blocked users, none of that’s in the app yet. It currently only syncs subscriptions

Next, it only syncs subscriptions that are already federated with both instances. You can see which instances fail while the process is going, but as soon as it finishes, that information is gone, meaning you’ll have to manually compare your sub lists in both instances.

Last, don’t bother compiling it yourself like me. There haven’t been any major updates since the last release, just some minor bugfixes. Save yourself the time.