What the hell happened with vlemmy.net?
What the hell happened with vlemmy.net?
The site is down, and I don't remember any calls for defederation or anything like that
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
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.
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.
It just disappeared. Common theory is the vlemmy admin found illegal content posted on his server and nuked the entire instance.