This document lays out concerns for "self hosters" of services that contribute to the decentralised or #fediverse. At present, these concerns are not addressed in any comprehensive manner anywhere, though they have been around for some time.

Discussed here are two areas where help is needed from a properly-resourced organisation for small operations hosting federated services or operating nodes that contribute to the decentralised web.

Governments around the world are passing more and more laws governing how internet services behave. These laws seek to control how certain information can be made available on the internet. Terrorism-related information, child abuse imagery, copyright infringing material, abusive postings, hate speech and data protection are some of the concerns that these laws address, or seek to address (or whose sponsors assert they seek to address).

A review of the news reporting around these matters shows that it's very hard to get the controls right. Many of these laws assume that only large services will be impacted, and some of these laws nakedly target specific companies or internet services, often for nothing more than populist reasons.

Where possible, civil society organisations like the ACLU and EFF, Open Rights Group and Digital Rights Ireland, EDRi, La Quadrature du Net, the FSFE and others seek to influence the laws, either by engaging the the legislative process or – failing that, or when some unanticipated scenario arises – through the courts. However, in the main, these efforts are again focused on the affect that the larger organisations and services have on the rights of internet users as they are thought of as consumers, rather than active contributors.

An example of an exception to this approach was with the EU Copyright Directive that was approved in 2019. During the development of the law, a proposal that risked killing Free and Open Source Software development was eventually removed because the impacts would have had a serious and large negative and real impact on innovation.

In all jurisdictions there needs to be a means for the interests of federated services, and other decentralised operations, to be represented in the legislative process. In particular, the unnecessary negative consequences to the decentralised web and to federated services of new would need to be made known to the relevant parliaments and congresses, allowing them the proper opportunity to address these concerns.

For the purposes of this document, self-hosting is when an individual or small organisation will host a web-based service instead of making use of the larger, more well-known, centralised services. For example, instead of using twitter, an individual may use mastodon, or instead of using WhatsApp, an activist group may prefer the greater independence that a Matrix homeserver offers.

These individuals or groups will rarely be expert on all the laws that apply to them as hosters or operators of such services, and equally rare will it be that they have easy access to well-informed legal advice.

This could have some concerning effects:

• The service may unwittingly be operated or configured in a manner that is not legal in its jurisdiction (or in the jurisdiction of a proportion of its users, perhaps even of just one of the users!), exposing the operator to civil or criminal action.
• The service operator may be aware of the existence of such laws, but not fully appreciate their responsibilities, and therefore will be constantly anxious about the risk of an allegation of illegally operating the service
• And many people may decide that the laws are just too onerous or risky to bother, depriving the ecosystem of a potentially valuable federated or decentralised participant; sending more users unnecessarily to the powerful incumbents.

A properly-resourced organisation could be a highly valuable resource for addressing these two categories of concern.