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.

  • @[email protected]English
    13•11 months ago

    Thanks for the notice and actions taken. Mostly new user here and when I chose this community while it was primarily as a starting point, a big bonus for me was the transparency and minimalism when making decisions. Kinda like a doctor, “don’t do more harm than strictly necessary”. The fact that you are doing what current tooling allows you to do and are willing to re-evaluate the issue as the tooling improves, all while placing the community first, for me it feels I chose right.