Hello all,

Over the last 48 hours the community has had the opportunity to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and rammy.site (as an extension of Exploding Heads following its abandonment).

Before we move on to the result, I just want to add that there are no winners or losers here, and rather this is a vote we had to call because the moderation tools for Lemmy users and for Lemmy admins are not yet robust enough, and that in the future we hope that the real best outcome will be to allow users to choose to defederate/block instances entirely.

The results of the poll are as follows:
76% of votes were to defederate, with 24% of the vote to not defederate.

Based on the majority of votes, we’ve now implemented the block on those instances.

If/when the robust moderation tools are in place in the future, we will revisit this block and look instead to block problematic communities.

I appreciate everyone taking the time to vote, and all the discussion that has taken place around this topic. It has also helped the admin team to better be aware of our responsibilities to yourselves as users of this instance, and our instance’s footprint in the wider fediverse.

I also need to mention we’ve been made aware of illegal content on the burggit.moe instance involving depictions of underage children in sexual acts. Even in cartoon style, these are illegal in many countries, including the UK, and so we’ve implemented a block on that instance too under the “illegal content” clause in our Defederation Policy. Upon review it appears we had very few (i.e. 1) subscribers to most of these communities on that instance, and so we don’t believe this will have any impact on the current userbase.