We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team.
We have made attempts to contact the Rammy admins, which other instance admins have tried as well, to determine their current status. Due to their admins being absent and their unmoderated content growing in numbers, we will defederate from Rammy. If and when this situation changes, we will be happy to reevaluate our approach. It should be noted that any instances that have abandoned admin teams will be defederated.
I imagine a lot of people have jobs where it would be trivial to set something like this up on company resources under the radar and then lose access / get laid off without the company ever knowing it’s running
This is pretty unlikely. Any competent IT department would notice an externally facing project.
I think its more likely that its on a vps or something and they just paid for like a year upfront.
No. It’s very likely. Not every company is run like a FAANG company with everything under a microscope. At your average company, it’s extremely common for individual teams to just have their own cloud service accounts for internal team use, not as tightly controlled as a company’s production cloud services account. I’d argue most of them are very loosely managed by a single person, letting said person do pretty much whatever they want.
And if those accounts have thousands of dollars in AWS credit or something, this could run under the radar for up to 6 months uninterrupted, depending on when the credits expire. Most credits are handed out for free from the cloud service provider with no cost auditing or anything of the like.
I’m in a position where I could do this myself at work with very low risk of getting caught. I just have no interest in doing so, and I’d rather not be fired if I did get caught. But it’s definitely possible.
Possible does not equate to likely. Its a pretty ridiculous scenario to assume when its much more reasonable to suspect that its just being hosted on a stable system and paid in advanced.
I wouldn’t say it’s a ridiculous scenario, just less likely than a proper self-hosted instance. There are plenty of companies that don’t have a microscope on everything, still not a good reason to use their resources for something like lemmy instances
At mine, we get our own personal public dev sites which can host whatever code & software we like, alongside the products we develop and their APIs.
Totally possible to set up a lemmy instance and nobody would know, but not worth losing a job over at all if caught.