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.
From what I understand, this specific instance is hosted in Ireland, which is why it’s attempting to appeal to Irish law and covering it’s ass by defederating from a community.
It has no further influence on instances based in other countries, so any Irish law that would abolish free speech wouldn’t apply to the fediverse at large, just any instances based out of Ireland.
Additionally, if there is a clearly unjust law that is worth breaking, the community and admins can reevaluate on a case by case basis. This is a good law and worth following.
As for this instance, if Ireland makes a bad law, we could always relocate the hosting or server to a freer country.