PrinceHabib72
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.
Chrono Trigger is so far ahead of its time, it’s insane. Enemies visible on the field map, battles taking place directly on the field map, character positioning mattering immensely, multi-character attacks, incredible music that holds up today, a compelling story with something like 15 total endings (granted, it’s not like they’re ENTIRELY different from one another, there are a few major branches with a few variations each)… Most of these things would all but vanish from games for twenty-plus years. I remember when Final Fantasy 12 came out, it was lauded for having the enemies shown on the map and battles taking place on the map as well.
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.
Props to the mods for sticking to their guns.