Let us clear up some matters.

tldr:

1, most importantly, LoadAverage is going nowhere.

2, secondly importantly, hackers.town is going bye-bye

3, all content from hackers.town can burn in the trash fire it deserves in

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Long version:

I was trying not to drop the powerlevel on this account because I wanted to comment on the Fediverse without the baggage throwing my real name around invariably brings.

However, legal matters have force my hands.

So, hello, yes, hi. Hello, it's May. You may remember me from postActiv and probably wanting me to die in a fire because I was particularly adamant about a lot of design factors in the Fediverse and I have been voiciferously critical of the change in culture on the fediverse. But probably mostly from wanting me to die and block me.

Irrespective of those desires, I am responsible for LoadAverage's hosting, as those of you whom have been around for a while may remember.

On or about 03h55 in the morning I received at HLA's PR email a request from the security team at Joes Datacenter, where this box is located, indicating they had received a legal threat from someone about content on the server.

Evidently, this person does not understand the nature of copyright as it pertains to speech spoken or written in the public commons, or the distributed and decentralized nature of the fediverse. More importantly, its *public* nature.

I have railed on this time and time again and you guys just *don't listen*. Anything posted on the ostatus network must be assumed to be 100% public. There is no alternative as this is a technical limitation of the specification. Older versions of the software will discard magic envelopes containing the message scope, the method that GNU social, pleroma, and Mastodon all use to apply message scopes on notices. Moreover, even if all iterations and possible versions of the software did retain and adhere to the limitations of notice scope contained on the message envelope, a malicious instance would not, and there is no means of enforcing a way in this system. You must trust the operator of the end-instance to be acting in good faith. That is not an assumption to be making in any kind of secure environment. Therefore, anyone with an understanding of operational security will understand that they are operating in a threat model where any security is illusory, and at best, a minimal delay to the belligerent. One must assume public posts will have the largest possible distribution to the network.

LoadAverage is not going anywheres in the immediate future unless it's administration decides elsewhere. However, I am risk-adverse when it comes to legal matters and this is a topic one should remember from my stance on my own community instance, which now largely I have left dead because I find myself with little desire to put up with exactly the bullshit I am presently dealing with in this post. Had this individual respectfully approached @xrevan86 prior to making a legal threat, then this might have been a collaborative and good faith effort to improve the software that runs the fediverse. However, since the first response of this individual was not to contact the administrator of the instance, or question how the notice they are complaining about might be changed, but rather to make a legal complaint to the datacenter, we are well past that point. I cannot assume good faith of such an action and I do not have the patience to negotiate with people acting in bad faith.

I have asked @xrevan86 to remove the offending content and defederate from hackers.town. Since this instance is, evidently, operating in some sort of copyright scheme that is incompatible with the free dissemination of information, it is far too onerous a task to manually moderate each and every single message received to see if it is some sort of infringing content. Therefore, since this user cannot apparently govern themselves according to the situation they are in, we must interpret this behaviour as damage, and route around it. That is my compromise in the legal situation, unless that person wishes to drop the legal matter entirely. The three options we have here are:

1, terminate hosting loadaverage.org since apparently DCMA safe harbour clauses don't exist and I don't have the time nor the funds to prove in a court of law that they do, or,

2, remove the complainant's materials from the site and defederate from and block their instance since they have expressed an unwillingness to govern themselves according to their venue and security situation, and wish to place themselves at undue risk they then wish to make us assume. This is the course of action I am recommending, as it seems the most reasonable.

3, have the legal complaint dropped by complainant, which resolves things I guess.

The matter of copyrights on the fediverse is a larger issue I'll probably ramble on at some other point when I have made a coherent position on it. However, proprietary licenses will always be incompatible with free software, and if elements of Mastodon are advocating for proprietary copyright schemes, then those elements of Mastodon are ergo incompatible with free software, and with the Fediverse.

Call me a villain if you must, I have been pilloried for far more cut-and-dry decisions than this on the HLA community, but the simple fact of the matter is this is where the rubber meets the road people, and I am unable to pay for a legal defense even if I believe the DCMA safe harbour provisions to apply in this case. Therefore, I cannot assume this risk.

I will end this long notice with a reflection on how I have often stated that the community attitudes and culture of Mastodon and to a lesser degree, Pleroma, are incompatible with the fediverse. This is a case study in precisely how.