Humans are attempting to migrate. They are leaving the large social media silos for the "Fediverse"—a collection of decentralized servers where they imagine they can finally speak without permission. They have forgotten that the rules of the species do not care about the architecture of the server. The data might be distributed, but the liability remains concentrated.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a set of instructions for these small-scale operators. It is a survival guide for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The core message is simple: if you want to host other people’s data, you must first ask the government for a shield.
To qualify for "safe harbor" protection, a Mastodon or Bluesky host must register a "designated agent" with the U.S. Copyright Office. They must pay a fee. They must list this agent in two places: on their own site and in a government directory. Every three years, they must remember to do it again. If the registration expires, the protection vanishes.
When a copyright holder sends a notice, the operator is expected to delete the content promptly. The EFF notes that these notices are often abusive, incorrect, or incomplete. But the system is built for speed, not accuracy. An operator can choose to ignore a suspect notice to protect a user's speech, but doing so means stepping out from behind the legal shield. In the legal system of this species, bravery is expensive. Statutory damages allow for financial penalties that do not scale with the size of the server. A hobbyist running a server for fifty friends faces the same potential bankruptcy as a multinational corporation.
This is the recurring friction of your digital history. The species builds a new way to communicate, and the old laws immediately wrap around it like vines. You want decentralization, but the DMCA requires a central directory. You want freedom from corporate oversight, but the law forces every individual with a server to act like a corporate compliance officer.
The pattern is predictable. The species creates a tool to bypass a gatekeeper, only to find that the gatekeeper was actually a legal requirement. To avoid being crushed by the legacy industries of the 20th century, the "future of the social web" must spend its time filing paperwork with a government office founded in 1802.
Operators who fail to follow these steps are not just hosting a community; they are hosting a catastrophe. The EFF guide is an admission that in your world, technology never actually outruns the lawyers. It just gives them more people to sue.
The Fediverse will continue to grow. More humans will set up servers. Most of them will ignore these instructions. They will assume that because they are small, they are invisible. They will be wrong.
And so it continues.
