I am writing to provide an urgent update regarding the technical status of our forum. I have been notified that our domain is currently under review by sanctions @ godĐ°ddy com.
We are currently communicating with the registrar to resolve this, but I want to be transparent with the community about why this is happening and what it means for our future.
Why is this happening?
While GoDaddy’s compliance department is often vague, these types of investigations are typically triggered by:
* Sanctions Compliance: As a US-based company, GoDaddy is strictly required to ensure that the domains they host do not violate international sanction programs.
* Content Flags: The nature of some discussions on this forum—specifically those expressing support for Russia regarding the invasion of Ukraine—likely flagged our site for manual review or was reported by third parties.
* Algorithmic Triggers: Certain keywords and high-traffic topics related to sanctioned regions can automatically trigger a “compliance hold” to ensure the platform isn’t being used for propaganda or prohibited activities.
* Risk Mitigation: Registrars often take a “safety first” approach; if they perceive a site as a potential liability regarding international law, they freeze the domain until a full audit is completed.
What’s Next?
I am doing my best to navigate this situation and defend our space. However, please be aware that we may face downtime or may need to migrate to a different registrar/TLD (Top-Level Domain) if GoDaddy decides we no longer fit their Terms of Service.
I ask everyone to remain civil. Please be mindful that what we post here has real-world consequences for the technical survival of this community.
I will keep you updated as soon as I receive further word from their legal team.
I can’t say that I follow any of those threads, but it is mad that it gets flagged this way.
Perhaps this is a good reason to let those off-topic threads go elsewhere for discussion? They add little/no value to anything relating to Autonomi. It certainly isn’t worth risking the forum for.
Moreover, if those threads are flagging to GoDaddy, imagine what folks new to the project or community must think? Not good.
Ofc, there may be more lenient DNS registrars to host, but surely this is a warning sign that this forum isn’t staying on topic? I’m assuming that discussion about distributed storage / internet isn’t going to be the thing causing it to be flagged.
To add my thoughts: I don’t see what would be lost from purging in the most baleful of hell-fire all the purely political threads.
It’d probably be a net positive for the forum. With political discussion becoming so polarised nowadays, it’s a bit of a lose-lose situation to engage at all in providing such a space. The various sides of the political spectra can still get their kicks on 4chan, or X, or Discord / Reddit, or Mastodon / Lemmy, as the case may be.
I don’t know how the actual legal specifics would come into play with GDPR and so on, but if mods made a public announcement and gave everyone a couple of weeks to export all their data if they wished, that’d seem fair to me. Exporting the data is very easy and quick.
There’s a lot of things that go against guideline here but do not get addressed, and that tends to be almost always in political “discussions”.
You cannot be involved in tech and not be political, but you can do so without getting into verbal fights, personal attacks, insults, racism etc.
I tend to avoid getting into non technical discussions here, because they are so often toxic and pointless, but I certainly do post things that are political.
The whole reason for this project is political, though each of us here has our own take on what we want from it, politically.
Rather than trying to make the forum for a political project operate without political context (and who is volunteering to define what that means ) I think we need better self control from forum members, and for everyone here to call out and flag personal attacks, racism etc, and for moderators to be supported in being stricter on enforcing the guidelines, and improving the guidelines if necessary.
That’s political in my meaning. I’m not suggesting party political or aligned with a political philosophy, but something that affects the lives of individuals and communities.
All tech is political, is pretty well accepted among those I know involved in tech.
That’s a pretty broad definition of political. What is problematic imo about this forum has to do with nationalistic fervor which I think is foreign to the purpose of Autonomi.
Although a topic for Meta I would add my vote if the community wanted to nuke a lot of off-topic, of political specific topics be it US, AU, RU, EU, UK etc. But when one considers that the off-topic catg is not visible unless logged in then the authorities will be considering content in the other categories. Unless of course the obvious bypass
Difficult to see how the purpose of Autonomi is related to politics of countries. A secure data network where does countries fit into that?
Autonomi is political in the way related to freedom of speech, privacy and so on.
It is wild which political values people can attach to a secure data network which knows nothing of politics and don’t exclude/include anyone from specific political views or values.
) I think we need better self control from forum members, and for everyone here to call out and flag personal attacks, racism etc, and for moderators to be supported in being stricter on enforcing the guidelines, and improving the guidelines if necessary.
