Defederating from burggit.moe

I'm sure this will come as a disappointment to many of you as you have joined this instance specifically because we do not block or defederate with anybody. Unfortunately my hand is forced on this occasion.

As many of you know this server is hosted in Ireland. It has been brought to my attention that under Irish law:

Virtual child pornography is illegal in Ireland per the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act of 1998 which includes "any visual representation".[Irish Statute Book] The country has strict laws when it comes to child abuse material, even if it doesn't contain any "real children".

As you can understand this requires me to defederate and remove the offending material from my server. There are newer admin tools in the works which will allow me to block specific communities instead of whole servers. Once this is in place I will refederate with burggit and block the individual offending communities.

This will also apply to other servers with offending content but as far as I'm aware burggit is the only one for the moment.

I still maintain my ideal of not defederating as much as possible but sometimes its out of my hands.

Thanks to everyone for helping create this vibrant community and for supporting. I am dedicated to make VLemmy the best it can be.

43 comments

I doubt anyone is expecting the owners of vlemmy to put themselves in legal hot water. +1.

Seems reasonable and the transparency is excellent.

Generally I like the idea of being as open as possible, but I'm ok with this. I remember looking at the list of the largest instances a couple days ago and I saw burggit on there and their pitch to why people should join them is the same reason you're defederating with them, so I don't think there's anything there I'd want to see anyway
- Agreed completely. Thanks for all you do!
  
  Thanks, but I don't think I am who you think I am, I haven't done anything lol

Admin of Burggit here, thanks for approving me. We just wanted to say thank you! This is by far the most respectful defederation we have had and your intention to refederate once mod tools are better, so you can block loli/shota/cub communities specifically, goes above and beyond. It's clear this decision was made not because of your personal feelings on the matter, but entirely due to the legality of the situation in the location you are based. We look forward to seeing posts from this instance in the future, once mod tools improve. If you ever need anything, let us know, we will be glad to help in any way we can. :3

I am among the ones that don't want defederations whatsoever but the reasoning behind this choice is not arguable, the law is the law.
Thanks for the transparency and keep up the good work 👍🏻

Love the transparency of the decision and respect it.
When material is illegal, I don’t mind deferderating.
I joined vlemmy cause it felt above drama/politics between the bigger instances. I don’t mind removing smaller instances which are highly questionable (i understand if I’m not in the majority)

In addition to CSAM being illegal almost everywhere, it is also objectively morally abhorrent and should be shunned. There is no other possible stance to take.
- Loli is not abuse material, but it does count as child porn in some countries. That's the case with Ireland, in which vlemmy is hosted. In the Netherlands, where burggit is hosted, loli is legal as long as you can instantly tell it's fictional.
  
  Yeah because you know, normal people who aren't pedophiles like to watch animated CP. 🙄
- Not real big on banning things on moral grounds. It is subjective and a very slippery slope. "I dont want my kids to learn about Puritanism. The Bible isnt a real book. Its just a pamphlet for whatever church." These are things that people believe.

I understand this decision and support it but can you really get in trouble for something like this? Does this mean you need to basically review every community to make sure it follows Irish law??
- Im just liable to show that i make a good attempt. It was clear in this case so im obligated to do it.
  
  I see - that’s completely fair and understandable.
- If I understand that correctly, Lemmy instances cache other instances' posts and whole communities in order for federation to work, so even federating with such servers is pretty risky as it may technically count as distribution of child porn
  
  That seems like a pretty unfortunate flaw with federating. How can you possibly monitor what every instance is doing?

On my instance, if I add that domain to "blocked instances" is that the same as defederating?
- Yup thats all you need to do

Thanks for the notice and actions taken. Mostly new user here and when I chose this community while it was primarily as a starting point, a big bonus for me was the transparency and minimalism when making decisions. Kinda like a doctor, "don't do more harm than strictly necessary". The fact that you are doing what current tooling allows you to do and are willing to re-evaluate the issue as the tooling improves, all while placing the community first, for me it feels I chose right.

That's perfectly reasonable to me.

It's unfortunate to have to go back on a community decision, but it's more important to keep yourself legally in the clear. Thanks for the transparency, I definitely made the right choice with this instance.

Thank you very much!

Thanks for your transparency about this and detailed explanation of the reasons

I support this despite joining because of the non block stance. It is unrealistic to not defederate from anyone (also imagine if there was an instance full of bots just spamming every threat and dm's)
But the point is that as long as the blocked are the ones that are strictly necessary, and the decision is properly communicated, then I'm fine with it even if it's not a temporary defederation like this one.

Quick poll. Does anyone have a problem with vlemmy defederating from an instance which condones/promotes/allows child pornography as long as those bans have been vetted, considered and voted into practice by management?
- I have a problem conflating drawings with child abuse.

I’m totally fine with this. If people want to risk illegal activities they can just make an account there

Thanks for the transparency! It honestly is refreshing.

While this time it is something reasonable I cannot help but wonder what will happen if tomorrow a new Irish law say that there's no more freedom of speech or that say something is illegal, would that end the freedom of speech of most federations?
- From what I understand, this specific instance is hosted in Ireland, which is why it's attempting to appeal to Irish law and covering it's ass by defederating from a community.
  It has no further influence on instances based in other countries, so any Irish law that would abolish free speech wouldn't apply to the fediverse at large, just any instances based out of Ireland.
  
  Additionally, if there is a clearly unjust law that is worth breaking, the community and admins can reevaluate on a case by case basis. This is a good law and worth following.
  As for this instance, if Ireland makes a bad law, we could always relocate the hosting or server to a freer country.
- Only for Irish servers. I wouldn’t necessarily be on a Lemmy server hosted in Iran, Russia, North Korea, China… either. But because all the data is cached and I don’t necessarily care about my personal account that much, Im free to move around and open more accounts as I see fit. It works better than being on, say, Facebook, Twitter, Google or some other corporation that willingly make changes to their platforms to appease dictators and regimes that ask for it simply for their own financial gain.
  
  We need to host some in space, only law we have to worry about up there is the Outer Space Treaty.
  
  Makes sense, I didn't think about looking state laws to decide in which community create an account

43 comments