Two important notes: (1) This guide is focused on legal risks that flow from hosting other people’s content, under U.S. law. In general, the safe harbors and immunities discussed below will not protect you if you are directly infringing copyright or defaming someone. (2) Many of us at EFF are lawyers, but we are not YOUR lawyers. This guide is intended to offer a high-level overview of U.S. law and should not be taken as legal advice specific to your particular situation.
The law in New Zealand and Australia (where my .nz instance is hosted for now) are not very pomissive in the space of pron and espitally anything that looks remotely like CP (Henti et al). I have made the choice to defederate from any instance that promotes hosting porn. This is to [help] cover my ass. This extends to lemmynsfw, even though they are doing a good job of filtering their content. Active moderation is one thing that can save your ass (at least in NZ). If you are an instance owner you have to know the PORN/CP/etc statutes that you may run afoul of where you host.
Please not that I have not made a HUGE song and dance about de-federating lemmynsfw’s content and I’m not demanding that the ban whole communities of subscribers.
I think that us instance owners need better mod tools to police content that gets hosted on our instances. ie there is no easy way to check on any images that are uploaded to your instance.