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.
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
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 👍🏻
