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What the hell happened with vlemmy.net?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Out of the loop
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Vlemmy.net was my first home instance. The admin was responsive, transparent, and, most importantly for me, had a fairly absolutist perspective on free speech, refusing to defederate with anything at all, preferring to leave the choice up to the user. Unfortunately for him and the users, the Irish government, where Vlemmy.net was hosted, has a less favorable view of certain communities that it inevitably federated with.
Because federation causes copies of content to be saved to each federated instance, he wound up finding out that certain communities hosted content that, once saved onto HIS server, would get him sentenced to the Irish equivalent of "Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison". He defederated those instances, but the next day, Vlemmy.net was all but gone. His payment sites for donations now all lead to closed accounts, and I have not heard anything about anyone getting in contact with him.
The common understanding is that he got spooked by the potential legal ramifications, and either got a visit from the Irish authorities or was afraid of that possibility, and so chose to pre-emptively pull the plug. This all occured roughly two weeks ago.
That’s the issue with not defederating from some truly vile, reprehensible instances. It allows their users and content to potentially flood yours which is why there should be exceptions.
was any of that expected?
if you set up a shop and the rules are "anything goes", the people that it will attract are people that were shown the door everywhere else. that's because unless they are able to set up their own place, they have nowhere else to go. i understand this is motivated by anti-censorship views, but there are beneficial, noncontroversial kinds of censorship. nobody seems to be clutching their pearls when spambots, pedos, impersonators or isis recruitment videos are banned. it's usually called "functional moderation"
i'm being charitable there and not assuming that it was weirdo instance from the get go. they should have however considered that scenario and maybe set up everything in a place that doesn't seem to particularly care about content they had, whatever that was
this, along with nazi bar scenario, seems to be a very good argument for swift and preemptive defederation policies
The day before it went down he posted that it was brought to his attention that animated content was illegal in his country. All of this could have been avoided if he properly researched his country's laws before inviting all this.
it's either autocorrect or one of us is having stroke
It's not that the people on vlemmy were "shown the door" everywhere else. It was merely the people who decided they wanted to choose for themselves which doors they would enter, and not be told by an admin they couldn't enter certain doors. The instance I'm on now isn't defederated with anything either, and if it ever does, I'll find a new one that doesn't. I don't like being told which parts of the internet I'm not intelligent enough to decide for myself about how I feel. I can curate my own feed by simply blocking communities I don't like, or by only subscribing to ones I do and browsing the Subscribed feed. I get burggit.moe and lemmygrad.ml and exploding-heads and all the other ones people don't like, and if I see a community on any of them I don't like, then it's MY job to block it from my view, not an admins. I respect those who would like a more curated experience and there are instances for that, but don't assume everyone who is in support of completely open federation is a pedo, nazi, socialist, fascist, or ANYTHING else. It just means they want to decide for themselves.
It's not about you feeling like a big kid or feeling over protected. It's not the subscriber that is left sitting with a server full of illegal material if someone subscribes to that sort of content, it's the instance owner, and they will be the ones that end up risking prison
If you want federation with everything, then make your own instance which hosts copies of child abuse, terrorist and hate material. But don't criticise admins for not wanting to risk jail time so you can feel uncensored.
I... Didn't criticize them? I'm very confused where your vitriol came from.
I can't see a sensible way to read your comments as anything but critical of admins who choose not to federate with all instances.
My so-called vitriol is because I appreciate that by running an instance, admins are providing a service to me while bearing the brunt of the financial and legal responsibilities that go with that. If I don't like how they run it, it's incumbent on me to get out of their house and move into my own rather than complaining.
Did you miss where I said this?
vlemmy wasn't shown the door anywhere, but instead vlemmy wasn't showing the door to anyone either. i can block exploding heads and such, but this only prevents me from seeing their rancid behaviour, it's still there. for the same reason in fb private groups if you block admins it's customary to ban you, because everything you do flies under their radar
you might block exploding-heads; but they will influence people that didn't, and you'll have no idea. i don't think it's practical approach to moderation and community building. exploding-heads were defederated from .world for exact this reason: they would say "oh if this bothers you just block them" but this misses the point completely. they went there to recruit new people and weren't concerned too much about contributing, instead they saw .world entirely as pool of people yet to be radicalized. if you blocked them as they wanted, that would just decrease their criticism
and that was just a single instance with 30? fuckups to its name when it happened. vlemmy was willingly getting in contact with many more, this is not sustainable. yes, not giving nazis a platform is a good idea, i thought it was already common knowledge
How is the uptime on feddit? I might switch.
I have yet to notice downtime, and I browse pretty often. It's pretty fast, too. I haven't noticed any major slowdown.
I actually wonder whether he had trouble blocking the instance he intended to, and just shut down vlemmy instead in the end. It's pretty strange he just disappeared from everything, though.
Free speech absolutism kind of works to the extent communism does. It makes you do absolutely lunatic shit.
Well, at least lemmy seems to be basing servers in the tech hotbeds. Twitter, google, Facebook, Microsoft etc all have bases in Ireland.
I'm going to guess that's to avoid paying taxes as the big companies can use Ireland as a tax haven. Not the greatest thing to be associated with.
Lol, what taxes do you think the lemmy 8mstance would be paying? Ireland is not a tax haven and hasn’t been for quite a while. It does have a moderately low, but non zero, company tax rate, but that’s like saying Texas is a tax haven as their income tax is not the same as California.
Ireland has a well educated young workforce and is in the eu with ties to the USA and speaks English. It’s not odd that tech companies are there. It’s not shell companies there, it’s tech hubs.
I should have clarified that I think Ireland is a tech hotbed for tax reasons, not that the Lemmy instance is there for tax reasons. I'm not trying to discredit the educated workforce in Ireland but I often see the words "taxes" and Ireland together when talking about the large tech companies.