I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I’m able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it’s being blocked.
I understand that some limitations are necessary to prevent spam and other abuse, however this is a very blunt instrument. The fact that I have a 10 month old account with consistent activity should outweigh any IP address reputation issues.
Perhaps the VPN limitations could be narrowed in scope to cover only account creation and posts from young accounts.
But then still the questions comes up “Why didnt you blocked vpns? or TOR?” we will be not the main liability holder, but we will be accountable for those accidents.
An investigator asking a question is not liability, and I don’t believe any of the safe harbor or platform immunity laws in the EU or USA condition their protections on denying service to users from IP addresses belonging to providers that don’t provide a certain level of assistance to law enforcement. I’m nearly certain you can’t get in any kind of legal trouble for not blocking privacy-protecting services like Mullvad.
That’s separate from the operational concern: you don’t want people to post CSAM. I don’t want people to post CSAM. Nearly everyone else doesn’t want people to post CSAM, and most of us are willing to accept some level of inconvenience so that you can prevent or limit it. That said, once Lemmy offers more fine-grained tools, I hope lemmy.world will adopt a more fine-grained policy.
We still want to be on the safe side as we all arent lawyers ( and we dont have much money for it ).
And in the end we will see where mod tools go on lemmy.