I want to self host a suite of services and make them public.
What kind of services? Well, all kinds. Matrix, lemmy, bookwyrm, and I may think of others in the future.
The problem? I don’t even know where to begin from a legal stand point. Not only that, I am a barely legal immigrant (vulnerable to deportation) from a country that is not very liked by the gov. I am afraid to put myself in a vulnerable position and get more trouble than the typical US citizen.
Is there a reasonable way to be able to self host public services without legal trouble? Is there a resource I can follow for best practices to avoid issues?
Assuming your in the US legally you shouldn’t have an issue. If you are illegal and are not suppost to be in the US self hosting services isn’t going to change anything.
Anyway I would not host any services at home as that’s a major security and privacy risk. If you are wanting to access your own personal stuff use a VPN or route traffic though a VPS. If you want to host a public server you can do so though a VPS where the risk to you is much lower. It also will have the benefit of having high availability by design.
Truth be told, I haven’t really considered legality when hosting anything. Most of my stuff is self created with open source software for personal use. I’m going to guess and say all that is good.
The only legally questionable stuff I can think of is sharing public access to licensed software or somesort of copyrighted media downloader. Stay clear of those and you should be good.
There are also legal things such as TOR and, yes sometimes VPN, that can raise eyebrows. While they aren’t illegal, many sites and services block them. I ran a TOR node for a few days, and within a week it seemed like 1/4 of the internet blacklisted me. Wasn’t really fun. Had to change my MAC address and snag a new IP address from my ISP.
I don’t really open my servers to non-family and friends. I don’t want to spend the time being a babysitter for 20 sites. If that’s a concern, perhaps rethink who you give access to.
Trust your gut. You kinda know if you’re walking a line.
This is also one of the biggest reasons for me why i stopped hosting things for strangers. My country is insanely backwards with when it comes to internet law. For example Mastodon (and others) caches media and text-contents of posts from remote instances on your own server, you are now distributing - you don’t even need to directly follow someone who posts media (attachments) or even just links to a website thats hosts unlawful stuff and you’re on the hook and considered just as responsible as the original poster. Insanity.
In general, unless your service is pretty big, just following best practices for security and moderation should be fine. Once you get to a certain user base size, laws start kicking in regarding what data you can collect, how you can manage it, what responsibilities you have with regard to that data, etc.
That being said, seeing as you are not a citizen, I’d advise you to just provide the resources to someone else who can do all the hosting for you. That way they’re assuming all the liability.
If you’re not doing anything illegal/copyright violating, then you can host whatever you want. Self-hosting isn’t illegal, in fact it’s what nearly every business does in some fashion. It’s just risky from an intrusion perspective
But if you’re going to host something, it should be via a secure channel - a VPN, Reverse Proxy from a VPS, Mesh Network (perhaps with a web-hosted entry point), etc.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Assuming your in the US legally you shouldn’t have an issue. If you are illegal and are not suppost to be in the US self hosting services isn’t going to change anything.
Anyway I would not host any services at home as that’s a major security and privacy risk. If you are wanting to access your own personal stuff use a VPN or route traffic though a VPS. If you want to host a public server you can do so though a VPS where the risk to you is much lower. It also will have the benefit of having high availability by design.
Uh… don’t? I mean, why rush it? Host it privately. What compels you to host publicly facing such high risks?
Truth be told, I haven’t really considered legality when hosting anything. Most of my stuff is self created with open source software for personal use. I’m going to guess and say all that is good.
The only legally questionable stuff I can think of is sharing public access to licensed software or somesort of copyrighted media downloader. Stay clear of those and you should be good.
There are also legal things such as TOR and, yes sometimes VPN, that can raise eyebrows. While they aren’t illegal, many sites and services block them. I ran a TOR node for a few days, and within a week it seemed like 1/4 of the internet blacklisted me. Wasn’t really fun. Had to change my MAC address and snag a new IP address from my ISP.
I don’t really open my servers to non-family and friends. I don’t want to spend the time being a babysitter for 20 sites. If that’s a concern, perhaps rethink who you give access to.
Trust your gut. You kinda know if you’re walking a line.
Good luck!
This is also one of the biggest reasons for me why i stopped hosting things for strangers. My country is insanely backwards with when it comes to internet law. For example Mastodon (and others) caches media and text-contents of posts from remote instances on your own server, you are now distributing - you don’t even need to directly follow someone who posts media (attachments) or even just links to a website thats hosts unlawful stuff and you’re on the hook and considered just as responsible as the original poster. Insanity.
I guess you’re from Germany too?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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I don’t really know anything about this, but good luck :)
In general, unless your service is pretty big, just following best practices for security and moderation should be fine. Once you get to a certain user base size, laws start kicking in regarding what data you can collect, how you can manage it, what responsibilities you have with regard to that data, etc.
That being said, seeing as you are not a citizen, I’d advise you to just provide the resources to someone else who can do all the hosting for you. That way they’re assuming all the liability.
The EFF has a good document on this topic.
You can host overseas and use a proxy for hosting. I mostly don’t worry about it though because I don’t do anything illegal.
I don’t plan on doing anything illegal myself, but apparently that’s not enough.
Where overseas can I be free of legal issues? Can you elaborate on what you mean by using a proxy for hosting?
Assuming you are in the US legally you won’t have issues. If your illegal that’s a different story and you are going to be in trouble regardless
If you’re not doing anything illegal/copyright violating, then you can host whatever you want. Self-hosting isn’t illegal, in fact it’s what nearly every business does in some fashion. It’s just risky from an intrusion perspective
But if you’re going to host something, it should be via a secure channel - a VPN, Reverse Proxy from a VPS, Mesh Network (perhaps with a web-hosted entry point), etc.
He’s talking about user generated content from other users.