I’m just a cat walking on a keyboard…
I would love to have the EFF chime in, but there are some protections for you as a host under the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) - or safe harbor provision in the USA.
As to how that has been tested legally on federated content, I don’t know. Perhaps another elder of the internet can tell me how Usenet servers handle it.
I picked up an old Dell Optiplex tower and slapped 4 cheap 4 TB drives in it. Setup as RAID 5 I got 12 TB of “redundant” storage for cheap! Perfect spot to keep all the p0rn torrents.
But I used OpenMediaVault for that deployment. It’s been OK… but I kinda feel that I am missing out on some of the more active developments of other distributions.
Despite that, I would absolutely suggest grabbing an old office computer and throwing some drives into it for a home NAS.
What are you implying here? That @gabe should never have bothered with running a server? What about the server you are connected to right now? Should they shut down because of what may travel across it?
No.
They’re protected under the same rules as somebody running a WiFi hotspot at a coffee shop. As long as they are doing everything within reason to be a good steward of their local network (which is what Gabe is doing) then they are protected.