Announcement of defederation from lemmy.org (unmoderated instance)

Note: this is a routine censure that we all felt wasn't worth putting to a user vote at this time, since it should be fairly uncontroversial to defederate from an unmoderated instance.

Censure reason

Unmoderated instance, now operated by Mazdak, the CEO of "https://ad.plus/", an AI ad-tech company. Admin is unresponsive to reports of bigotry and transphobia, and is not responding to attempts at contact by other admins.

Additional context from other instance admins

Have seen an uptick of trolls and hit-and-run accounts from this instance. Registrations are open with captcha-only.

this instance appears to have zero checks on signups, not even asking for emails, making this a welcome home for trolls and ban evaders who will even boast about it in other communities. the instance appears to be effectively unmoderated, as the admin of the instance only seems to take action when spam is posted in their local communities, despite frequently being active by posting to their own communities.

I sent a DM to the lemmy.org admin a few days ago and have not received a reply. They've been plenty active since the DM, so it's clear to me that they don't particularly care that I defederated them or about this issue

Other details

Unfortunately, the admin of lemmy.org, Mazdak, is a self-declared AI ad-tech company bro, who has reportedly been trying to sell Lemmy.org for a huge sum.

Concerningly, the admin has not been responding to reports of bigotry and other serious content violations, and they have already been defederated by blahaj.zone for this reason, and we have followed suit.

Moderation of lemmy.org has effectively ceased for many communities, and several instance admins have seen an increase in use by bad actors. E.g., just yesterday:

We will of course reconsider this situation if the admin reaches out and agrees to start actively managing reports.