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Comment by fredwu | Hacker News Reader

Good question! I will write a more detailed blog post in the next week or two. In short, it's hosted on Fly.io - with instances distributed across Australia, US and EU, with a clustered Postgres in those regions too.

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You'll need to register with the US copyright office as soon as possible. Not doing so means that any jerk sending a DMCA, legitimate or otherwise, can sue you personally and win, even if you prove in court that you had no knowledge of the specific instance they are suing over. This comes up more than once a year on English-language social media sites with as few as 1000 users, which can be shocking to people new to operating social media and/or forums.

There are also other relevant laws like COPPA, FOSTA-SESTA and GDPR, but the timeframe for those is not particularly urgent. Additionally, if you aren't retaining legal counsel and are handling things yourself, the Australian Communications Alliance has some handy explainers on compliance with these other laws for site owners.

How does this not happen more often to Mastodon servers?

I think the maturity of the userbase plays a part in having less copyright violations and/or reporting abuses than normal but additionally the people who host Mastodon instances tend to be more clued in than you'd expect. The few times I've seen Mastodon hosters ask for help with their first DMCA they already have a registration set up.

Ah, thanks for the tips, really appreciate it! I'll look into these.

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