Except the author generally does not design the book cover, and often does not design the thumbnail.

The thumbnail is not the content.

Do you also judge books by their covers?

This is going to involve Bitcoin, isn’t it?

there’s no 3rd party like there is with Lemmy and

3rd parties are not new. All these issues came up when Google, YouTube, etc started storing third party content. They still exist today because they followed the rules.

So there’s no American users on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or even lemmy.world itself?

What? No, my point is that if you are American and host an instance, you’ll probably be ok. Just like Google and YouTube.

If you are not American and host an instance, then all bets are off. If you are Swiss, then you are probably ok. If you are North Korean, then maybe the police are coming for you right now.

What is “hosting”? Your lemmy “home”, lemmy.today for me, has a cached copy of all the content it’s users view.

In the US, if you have copyrighted content on your server and the copyright holder says “Get rid of it”, then you have to get rid of it. As long as you comply, you’ll be ok. That’s literally YouTube’s business model.

If you refuse, then the cops might come for you. In the US, cops don’t go after users who download copyrighted content, only those who make it available to others.

Just replace “Lemmy instance” with “blog”, and the answer is obvious.

“consider a Mexican user visiting a blog located in Germany to view Nazi content.”

The user is subject to Mexican laws. The blog owner would be subject to German laws. The instance owner is likewise subject to German laws.

Adding additional parties doesn’t change anything. For example, if a Mexican user on a Swiss VPN views content originating from a blog in Germany, then the user, the VPN, and the blog are all subject to laws of their own jurisdiction.

Those laws can regulate what content you can access, what content you can host, or both.

If you are American then your Lemmy instance is most likely be protected by section 230, and you probably don’t have to worry too much about non-pirated content. If you live in another country or host pirated content in the US, then YMMV.

Personally, I don’t see how YouTube can be abusive. It is their platform and they can do whatever they want with it. It is your choice if you use it or not. If you think the ads are out of control, you can pay for their subscription or use free services.

Personally, I don’t see how people using adblockers can be abusive. It is their computer and they can display whatever content they want with it. It is their choice whether an ad plays on it or not. If YouTube thinks the adblockers are out of control, they can start paying people money to watch content on YouTube’s computers.