I know Lemmy is about to take off because the porn is quickly moving from drawn henti and furry images to gonewild onlyfan contributors. I call it the QOTP Index (Quality Of The Porn). Reddit is done.
That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr's fields, as well.
Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn't shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.
So that's the issue we're going to have, here, and I'm not sure if the "some guy running an instance for the fuck of it" model is prepared for it.
The key difference with lemmy is, if that one instance is the one disseminating cp, they get defederated, and so removed from the other normal users, and then if the instance doesn't shut down, LEO gets involved. The other normal porn-hosting instances can operate business as usual.
The piratebay has been running since 2003 - 2023 on the clear web. Thats how hard it is to take down a website when done properly. With the few times its been down and/or raided thats still 99.99% uptime.
Hosting costs are very low due to the inherent nature of torrenting. It's essentially just an index of magnet links used for downloading torrent files. Apparently the whole TPB directory could fit on less than 100MB of storage. They don't actually host any of the illegal content they provide.
They've hosted the site on multiple cloud services, which law enforcement would have to play an endless game of whack-a-mole to truly dent.
Sweden are notoriously lenient on piracy and copyright infringement. TPB's founders only faced a year in prison and a hefty multi million dollar fine when they went to trial.
United States authorities are very unlikely to get the Swedish courts to extradite these individuals, because their 1960 extradition treaty is quite strict on what offences one can be extradited to the USA for, and the only mention of piracy on there refers to the maritime kind. Compare this to how easily Kickass Torrents was taken down and how the Polish authorities nearly got its founder flown out to the US to face trial.
The hosts not only provided the knowledge to but outright encouraged others to host mirrors/proxies of the website to get past DNS censorship.
There are ways to detect CSAM which makes it a lot easier to track down and lock up individuals who access it. Another big difference is that producing, distributing, and even possessing CSAM is seen as a far more heinous crime against humanity than downloading a pirated movie copy.
TLDR: there are three things that could survive a nuclear armageddon: cockroaches, Keith Richards and the Pirate Bay.
I don't know, law enforcement can be pretty slow. I definitely see a few cease and desists happening before any real action, and as soon as that starts, the sane instances defederate.
Regardless, the point is, they get taken care of in one of a multitude of ways.
Technology has more or less flowed with the proliferation of porn. VHS (over Betamax), bluray (over HD-DVD), online payments and other Internet features rose to prominence because pornographic content helped spearhead their adoption.
I will die on the hill that blu-ray won over HD-DVD purely because the PS3 could play blu-ray and the Xbox 360 couldn't play either. Blu-ray players were crazy expensive when the PS3 came out, to the point that the PS3 was the cheapest blu-ray player when it came out.
Porn industries only chose blu-ray once it was already in the PS3. Out of all the HD-DVD players and blu-ray players on the planet combined at the end of the format war 10 out of 11 were PS3s. Also not to mention that almost everyone backed blu-ray and it was the objectively better format. It held 40% more information and was backed by the biggest media companies. On top of the fact blockbuster went blu-ray.
Honestly it's very tiresome that everyone says that porn did it when you can look at the facts and see that the war was won by blu-ray from the start and that most porn content was available on both formats for a long time, basically guaranteeing that it couldn't have affected the outcome. Like I get that "haha porn funny" but it clearly wasn't the deciding factor, and arguably not a factor at all. Like any cursory look into the history dispels the myth immediately which makes me wonder why everyone feels the need to parrot it as if it's fact.
When I browse "all" on here, there is the occasional tiddy in between. I appreciate that. Reddit's r/all was so much better when nudity wasn't purged from it.