This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
But of they federated they’ll be hosting a copy.
I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have limitless money to pay lawyers
Comments like this sound like the “they write it off on tax” comments, where there’s this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can’t work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.
Since anyone can spin up a Lemmy server, at some point a rich person/persons will do so, which makes this a relevant question to ask.
I was thinking the same thing, as a legal question.
In the Fediverse, who’s the source/target for the law to look at, the originator, or all the cached copies on other servers?
Edit: Basically, what this comment describes…