That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.
Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.
So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.
The key difference with lemmy is, if that one instance is the one disseminating cp, they get defederated, and so removed from the other normal users, and then if the instance doesn’t shut down, LEO gets involved. The other normal porn-hosting instances can operate business as usual.
I don’t know, law enforcement can be pretty slow. I definitely see a few cease and desists happening before any real action, and as soon as that starts, the sane instances defederate.
Regardless, the point is, they get taken care of in one of a multitude of ways.
The piratebay has been running since 2003 - 2023 on the clear web. Thats how hard it is to take down a website when done properly. With the few times its been down and/or raided thats still 99.99% uptime.
Hosting costs are very low due to the inherent nature of torrenting. It’s essentially just an index of magnet links used for downloading torrent files. Apparently the whole TPB directory could fit on less than 100MB of storage. They don’t actually host any of the illegal content they provide.
They’ve hosted the site on multiple cloud services, which law enforcement would have to play an endless game of whack-a-mole to truly dent.
Sweden are notoriously lenient on piracy and copyright infringement. TPB’s founders only faced a year in prison and a hefty multi million dollar fine when they went to trial.
United States authorities are very unlikely to get the Swedish courts to extradite these individuals, because their 1960 extradition treaty is quite strict on what offences one can be extradited to the USA for, and the only mention of piracy on there refers to the maritime kind. Compare this to how easily Kickass Torrents was taken down and how the Polish authorities nearly got its founder flown out to the US to face trial.
The hosts not only provided the knowledge to but outright encouraged others to host mirrors/proxies of the website to get past DNS censorship.
There are ways to detect CSAM which makes it a lot easier to track down and lock up individuals who access it. Another big difference is that producing, distributing, and even possessing CSAM is seen as a far more heinous crime against humanity than downloading a pirated movie copy.
TLDR: there are three things that could survive a nuclear armageddon: cockroaches, Keith Richards and the Pirate Bay.
Yahoo banned porn on Tumblr because Apple found a CSAM image on their platform, banned their app from the App Store, then as a condition for unbanning the Tumblr app, issued them an ultimatum to outright ban pornographic content. I originally thought that Yahoo’s justification was an excuse they used because they couldn’t be bothered to invest the resources needed to purge illegal content from their platform, but apparently Discord have been hit with similarly puritanical demands from Apple and Google, who basically have a monopoly on what apps go on your smartphone,
Nevertheless, Tumblr’s porn exodus is the core reason why Yahoo sold the platform to Automattic for pennies compared to how much they originally acquired Tumblr for. It even sparked a renaissance of lewd artists flocking to Newgrounds - a site that was originally on its knees due to the death of Flash animations and browser gaming.
It’s also worth noting that Automattic have since partially dialed-back the ban. Nudity is allowed on Tumblr again, but graphic sexual content isn’t. Obviously they did this in direct response to Elon Musk enshittifying Twitter. Another reason I think Tumblr is living on is because it was known for three things: porn, niche fandoms and social justice warriors. Musk has notably burned bridges with any Twitter users who oppose hate speech.
God forbid if Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai find out there’s porn on Reddit…
Do you have a source on that? It doesn’t smell right. Every platform (All of them. Every single one. No exceptions) that allows user-submitted images/videos has an issue that some of that content is illegal. CSAM is the most obvious, but not the only one. What made Tumblr different from the 20 million+ instances on Facebook? Source1, Source2 At the time, scrolling through r/All for just a few minutes was nearly certain to show something pornographic, although not CSAM.
The story I heard (admittedly, I’m having trouble finding a source at the moment) is that Tumblr’s tools to remove CSAM weren’t good enough. While they would remove the offending image when it was reported, they did not delete the connections to other users/groups. Which meant it was easy to find more, even after some had been removed. In turn, that meant that it quickly became the platform of choice for anyone uploading this stuff, creating a higher volume and ratio of illegal content.
While I know Apple has long been anti-porn, it seems unlikely that they would take such an arbitrary hard line while ignoring countless others.
That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.
Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.
So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.
The key difference with lemmy is, if that one instance is the one disseminating cp, they get defederated, and so removed from the other normal users, and then if the instance doesn’t shut down, LEO gets involved. The other normal porn-hosting instances can operate business as usual.
Law enforcement would probably shut down such instances faster than the rest of Lemmy could collectively defederate them.
Hosting such stuff on the clear web is basically asking for a joint FBI, NCA and other major law enforcement agency raid on your premises.
I don’t know, law enforcement can be pretty slow. I definitely see a few cease and desists happening before any real action, and as soon as that starts, the sane instances defederate.
Regardless, the point is, they get taken care of in one of a multitude of ways.
The piratebay has been running since 2003 - 2023 on the clear web. Thats how hard it is to take down a website when done properly. With the few times its been down and/or raided thats still 99.99% uptime.
The Pirate Bay is a very unique case because:
TLDR: there are three things that could survive a nuclear armageddon: cockroaches, Keith Richards and the Pirate Bay.
Comments like these where the reason I joined reddit, glad to see more here.
Not quite how it happened.
Yahoo banned porn on Tumblr because Apple found a CSAM image on their platform, banned their app from the App Store, then as a condition for unbanning the Tumblr app, issued them an ultimatum to outright ban pornographic content. I originally thought that Yahoo’s justification was an excuse they used because they couldn’t be bothered to invest the resources needed to purge illegal content from their platform, but apparently Discord have been hit with similarly puritanical demands from Apple and Google, who basically have a monopoly on what apps go on your smartphone,
Nevertheless, Tumblr’s porn exodus is the core reason why Yahoo sold the platform to Automattic for pennies compared to how much they originally acquired Tumblr for. It even sparked a renaissance of lewd artists flocking to Newgrounds - a site that was originally on its knees due to the death of Flash animations and browser gaming.
It’s also worth noting that Automattic have since partially dialed-back the ban. Nudity is allowed on Tumblr again, but graphic sexual content isn’t. Obviously they did this in direct response to Elon Musk enshittifying Twitter. Another reason I think Tumblr is living on is because it was known for three things: porn, niche fandoms and social justice warriors. Musk has notably burned bridges with any Twitter users who oppose hate speech.
God forbid if Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai find out there’s porn on Reddit…
Do you have a source on that? It doesn’t smell right. Every platform (All of them. Every single one. No exceptions) that allows user-submitted images/videos has an issue that some of that content is illegal. CSAM is the most obvious, but not the only one. What made Tumblr different from the 20 million+ instances on Facebook? Source1, Source2 At the time, scrolling through r/All for just a few minutes was nearly certain to show something pornographic, although not CSAM.
The story I heard (admittedly, I’m having trouble finding a source at the moment) is that Tumblr’s tools to remove CSAM weren’t good enough. While they would remove the offending image when it was reported, they did not delete the connections to other users/groups. Which meant it was easy to find more, even after some had been removed. In turn, that meant that it quickly became the platform of choice for anyone uploading this stuff, creating a higher volume and ratio of illegal content.
While I know Apple has long been anti-porn, it seems unlikely that they would take such an arbitrary hard line while ignoring countless others.