Update: we’ve finally been in contact with Jonah and the material we originally flagged has been taken down. The link ban has been lifted.

We will be posting another announcement soon to provide more information and our future plans relating to federation.

Hello world,

following our previous decision to defederate lemmy.one due to their lack of responsiveness to abuse reports about CSAM hosted on their instance we have decided to also defederate from all other platforms operated by the same entity.

Lemmy.one is operated by Fediverse Communications LLC, which is ran by Jonah Aragon. Fediverse Communications LLC operates various Fediverse instances listed here:

• mstdn.party
• mstdn.plus
• lemmy.one
• mastodon.neat.computer
• pxlfd.plus

Jonah is also the project director of privacyguides.org and discuss.privacyguides.net is the community platform belonging to privacyguides.org.

Additionally, Jonah is also the director of Triplebit, the ISP used to host Fediverse Communications LLC infrastructure and also Privacy Guides infrastructure.

Our abuse reports to both Fediverse Communications LLC and Triplebit about CSAM hosted on lemmy.one have gone nowhere and this material is still up, almost 3 months since the original report. This has since also been reported to NCMEC (via Cloudflare) and other US law enforcement directly by us, but so far this hasn’t resulted in anything being taken down.

Although we do not believe that it is likely to find CSAM on privacyguides.org or privacyguides.net, going forward we will remove all posts and comments referencing privacyguides.org, privacyguides.net, or any of the domains of services operated by Fediverse Communications LLC. We will not ban any user for mentioning or linking them, only remove these posts and comments.

Privacy Guides has come to our attention as they are just now testing federation of their discourse forum, which is also coincidentally posted by Jonah.

We will be lifting this link ban once the offending material has been taken down, but we will not consider refederation with any instance that is operated by Fediverse Communications LLC until they can somehow convince us that they’ll be taking responsibility for their infrastructure in the future.

If the Privacy Guides team is willing and able to cut ties with Jonah we will also be more than happy to remove the ban of their domains and also refederate with their discourse forum even without the original issue with lemmy.one being addressed. Federation between discourse and Lemmy appears to currently still be quite limited or not be working at all, so for the time being the federation aspect may not have much relevance here.

It’s unfortunate that things had to this far; we generally try addressing issues like this in a friendly manner and reporting it privately to affected instances, as most people are more than willing to take down CSAM hosted on their infrastructure. In this case however, Jonah appears to be operating way beyond what he is able to manage. Being not only an instance operator but also an ISP puts a lot of responsibility in your hands, and at the very least you should respond to abuse reports. We have exhausted non-law-enforcement escalation steps a while back already; we went to their ISP, which they are conveniently themselves. We don’t know the actual server IP hosting this content, as it’s behind Cloudflare, so only law enforcement would be able to obtain this information.