This post keeps track of all instances that Lemdit is no longer federated with and the reason why they were blocked.

The Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:

Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:

  • If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
  • If they are acting as an attack vector towards us

10 July 2023

burggit.moe / lemmy.burger.rodeo - Defederated due to legal concerns. They host loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).

01 August 2023

lemmy.comfysnug.space - Defederated due to legal concerns. They host loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).

08 August 2023

detroitriotcity.com - Defederated due to legal concerns. I don’t even know where to start with this one, they appear to host a suite of things that are illegal, among which loli porn (cartoon porn depicting underage characters).

Defederation explained

All Fediverse instances talk to each other. When you search for a community, for example, you will get results from any instance that has a community that matches your search terms.

If you subscribe to a community from another instance, then all content posted to that community will automatically be “federated” (shared) with our instance. In practical terms, this means our server downloads and stores a copy of that content so that it can display it to you and everybody else on our instance. This is the content you see when you click on “All” from the menu at the top:

To “defederate” is to ban an instance from sharing content with us. This means that when you search for content, you will not get any results from them. There is no ability to subscribe to their communities and anything they post on their instance will not be shared with our server.

I consider this to be an extreme measure, which is why we reserve it for servers that purposefully allow content that is illegal in our country of jurisdiction (New Zealand). Not doing so would put us at risk, since our server can potentially store a copy of content that is illegal.