Another interesting question that I don’t know if Elestio has considered – maybe they have, if they do managed hosting outside of this – is the situation with content.

To give some examples of Fediverse instances – Lemmy, not kbin, but I expect that the same will apply – that I’ve seen:

• lemmy.dbzer0.com is run by the old lead moderator of /r/piracy and at least talks about copyright-infringing content. I don’t know if the instance itself actually has any.

• lemmy.blahaj.zone serves, among other things, LGBT-related material which apparently some governments, like the UAE, object to.

• lemmynsfw.com serves pornographic media. My understanding is that due to various laws surrounding pornography, often hosting providers will not handle commercial services that serve pornography.

• burggit.moe serves lolicon and consentual-nonconsentual pornographic material. The former and possibly the latter may be legal issues in some countries; it sounds like Elestio operates in a number of data centers and has some constraints on where their backups go, and the country with the datacenter handling backups may have different legal constraints. Germany and the US may be okay with this, but I bet that they operate in some regions that are not.

• I have not seen it yet, but I am sure that Nazi material and Soviet material – well, lemmygrad.ml probably has the latter – will show up. I’m in the US, where all this is First Amendment-protected stuff, but some countries in Europe have far-more-restrictive laws on content featuring one or the other and prohibit display of their symbols; I’m not sure how this applies to hosting services, but my guess is that the German government would take major issue with something like stormfront.org being hosted in Germany.

• As various services like Twitter have discovered, there are a lot of countries around the world who have governments who are very enthusiastic about tamping down on protests against and forums against the government or demanding information on users who speak out about the government. I believe that the pressure point here is to payment providers. As most people operating instances probably aren’t running a business and trying to target their payment providers is useless, trying to go after Elestio may be the next target.

• Depending upon where an instance is hosted, right to be forgotten laws may apply. The US does not have such a doctrine, but the EU does.

• The EU and the US may not take the same position on how art produced by generative AI and copyright should interact; this is in flux now. This may have major impact on where what content can be hosted.

I would be willing to wager that I have not seen the extent of content that is available on the Fediverse today in my few days on it. I would also wager that many users will start exploring what the limits are on what hosting providers will accept in various areas.

So there may be some interesting legal and ToS questions that will come up in the future.