The site is down, and I don’t remember any calls for defederation or anything like that
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.
I actually wonder whether he had trouble blocking the instance he intended to, and just shut down vlemmy instead in the end. It’s pretty strange he just disappeared from everything, though.
Well, at least lemmy seems to be basing servers in the tech hotbeds. Twitter, google, Facebook, Microsoft etc all have bases in Ireland.
I’m going to guess that’s to avoid paying taxes as the big companies can use Ireland as a tax haven. Not the greatest thing to be associated with.
Lol, what taxes do you think the lemmy 8mstance would be paying? Ireland is not a tax haven and hasn’t been for quite a while. It does have a moderately low, but non zero, company tax rate, but that’s like saying Texas is a tax haven as their income tax is not the same as California.
Ireland has a well educated young workforce and is in the eu with ties to the USA and speaks English. It’s not odd that tech companies are there. It’s not shell companies there, it’s tech hubs.
I should have clarified that I think Ireland is a tech hotbed for tax reasons, not that the Lemmy instance is there for tax reasons. I’m not trying to discredit the educated workforce in Ireland but I often see the words “taxes” and Ireland together when talking about the large tech companies.
Free speech absolutism kind of works to the extent communism does. It makes you do absolutely lunatic shit.
It just disappeared. Common theory is the vlemmy admin found illegal content posted on his server and nuked the entire instance.
