So the initial plan was just to take down the server and leave comments/etc up on other instances. Your account would effectively become frozen when viewed from other instances.

I didn’t want to make an announcement yet since I haven’t gotten a script ready, but I’m intending on running a script to at least purge my user account contents and give a week or so for the deletes to federate.

If I get it working this weekend, I was planning on offering to help purge data from people who were privacy conscious.

Thanks for choosing this instance! Lurking is still a completely valid usecase!

Thanks for choosing this instance! Sorry about the abrupt closing announcement, but I guess on the bright side a nickname refresh isn’t that bad 😅

First, thank you for your work for helping tackle a number of the federation issues (and other bugs!) in Lemmy! If anything, I’m more concerned about the broader Fediverse where there are people who think spreading CSAM is okay.

I’m actually really happy to see that the image_mode lets you disable federated images, that should be a big relief to instances with fewer resources to deal with (in case any other instance admins see my post, please give consideration to using it).

Hey, thanks for being a part, even just subscribing and voting! I promise you, activity had absolutely nothing to do with this.

There’s a lot of risk to take on by hosting images online, possibly hosting federated images, and whatnot. I just don’t want to personally assume the risk that entails. It’s a very large part why registration on this instance was pretty locked down from Day 1 and why it’s had a strict “generally SFW” policy.

I’ve made some changes related to the potential server load issue and will keep an eye on things.

So there were a few communities I thought (at points in time) that were a bit too-close to piracy and other rules. The only reason I’m hesitant to allow those are because I want to minimize the chances of having to deal with the headache of anything DMCA/legal.

It is entirely possible things have changed with them since I don’t regularly go back and check.

EDIT: A list of removed communities can be found here. The @dmvsocial account is what’s used to remove communities here. Entries from other users are communities getting removed on other servers which then removes it here.

To be completely honest, I don’t know what the tax implications could be for accepting donations and I really don’t think it would be worth the headache to figure it out. The server costs are like $45/mo right now (and the backups are like… pennies on top of that). I’d much prefer folks donate to the Lemmy devs or the developer of an app you use.

The instance has now been migrated. I’m still validating a few remaining items but I do not anticipate any further interruptions to the instance in the next half-hour.

Momentarily I will be taking this instance offline to block federation activities while a data snapshot is created.

During this time, DNS will redirect to the new instance, and the new instance will be available after the snapshot is restored.

Thanks for your patience!

deleted by creator

No problem! I was getting a bit worried last night and figured others would be interested to know that this was taken fairly seriously, even though this is a much smaller instance compared to many others 🙂

I’ve created the above guidelines to supercede the existing rules. These are a fairly verbose first-pass but should better indicate permissible content.

Thanks for this, and that was exactly my concern. I checked out a few and verified that they definitely looked odd. They’re blocked now and I’ll check out the script you linked later this evening.

I’m mostly done with the required changes. There will be a brief few-minute downtime tomorrow evening as I finish up one remaining task requiring me to bounce the Lemmy stack.

Not wrapped up yet, but for a quick update on activities so far:

• Enabled some alerting/monitoring to ensure the public-facing side of the site is up. Set up alert publishing to the dmv.social Support/Operations Discord
• Backups are now properly configured and are being stored off the main server.
• IPv6 should now be enabled and working

The blocklist (and allowlist) for any Lemmy instance is available at the “Instances” link at the bottom of each page.

I’m concerned with allowing federation with NSFW instances because of potential liability. If a user creates an account here and subscribes to a community with NSFW content, content and the links to the content gets copied to this instance. Given that a number of states are pushing content access laws – like VA – I’m not wanting to push my luck.

I’m open to re-evaluating this decision if it becomes possible to block subscribing to communities on those instances (which would alleviate my hosting concern) while still allowing users on those instances to interact with communities here.