I’m not really sure about that. I’m not saying it as an expert or anything, but that’s a discussion I saw around here the other day.
Basically, once you federate and copy the content to your instance, it is in your server and you are responsible for it.
I’ll agree with a few things, tho:
It barely happens today, on centralized platforms. They’re hardly obliged to remove content because some judge says so (it does happen, tho, at least in my country)
I’d imagine it would be a bit of a grey area legally, right now. We would need legislation regarding the fediverse. Imagine someone posts child porn in an instance yours is federated to. Your instance copies the content. You notice and defederated the whole instance, but don’t remove the content. The dude is banned by his home instance and his post is removed. But his copy still exists in yours, since you defederated before his ban and content removal.
Just saying that selfhosting brings a lot of things that need to come to your attention.
I saw “Blackberry” yesterday and it was a really good experience putting you in the context of those times.
There is one scene where they type a message and wait for it to show up on another device. After a few seconds, it is there and every engineer in the room celebrates.
Then, management/sales guy comes in and they tell about what they’ve just done. He goes yeah, nice, but we do it already, it’s called SMS.
The engineers then say that he is not getting the point. It was a message sent through the network using data, 0 dollars and all and salesman’s eye get brighter.
So yes, I think the sensation was alike.