It was brought to my attention that lemmy.comfysnug.space also hosts “loli porn”. This content is illegal in New Zealand as well as many other countries.

Needless to say they have been defederated and all their communities purged from our server.

I’m mostly posting this in the spirit of transparency as I don’t think this affects anyone here.

Please let me know if you do come across another similar instance, there are simply too many of them out there for me to check proactively.

I sincerely hope that this was the last of them, but if there are more, I also don’t think it’s worth me making an announcement every time we defederate one. I may instead create a generic defederation post where we keep tabs on who we defederated and why, but I welcome your feedback.

As a reminder, the Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:

Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:

  • If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
  • If they are acting as an attack vector towards us
  • Gnubyte@lemdit.comEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Hey I’m curious and sort of new to what the administration terms mean for the average user here. What does defederating mean in this case?

    Is it actually defederated or is it just that we’re blocking traffic from their instance?

    • delendum@lemdit.comOPMEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Hey, thanks for calling this out, it’s easy to forget that the average user isn’t that familiar with what everything means.

      All Fediverse instances talk to each other. When you search for a community, for example, you will get results from any instance that has a community that matches your search terms.

      If you subscribe to a community from another instance, then all content posted to that community will automatically be “federated” (shared) with our instance. In practical terms, this means our server downloads and stores a copy of that content so that it can display it to you and everybody else on our instance. This is the content you see when you click on “All” from the menu at the top:

      To “defederate” means to ban an instance from sharing content with us. This means that when you search for content, you will not get any results from them. There is no ability to subscribe to their communities and anything they post on their instance will not be shared with our server.

      I consider this to be an extreme measure, which is why we reserve it for servers that purposefully allow content that is illegal in our country of jurisdiction (New Zealand). Not doing so would put us at risk, since our server can potentially store a copy of content that is illegal.

      • Gnubyte@lemdit.comEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Thank you for explaining! Clear as crystal.

        I’m sure we all appreciate you taking measures to make sure the server doesn’t get embroiled in those dealings.