No one really knows, there are some plausible theories of negligence but in reality it is most probable the owner just decided to pull off the plug dince not only the server went down but the donation links did too.
He didn’t tell anyone and no one has been in contact with him
Like 3 days after the server went down there was a post on an investigation on what happened which made some discoveried and said they had some leads however there hasn’t been a follow-up to my knowledge
Vlemmy was a good one, although you are almost two weeks late with your question since it fell down :( (Although it was going to defederate with an instance the day before closing due to not wanting to host illegal content, for obvious reason)
I would love for another one to sprung out, I myself am quite trigger happy with blocking people and communities (even instances through my app) so I would always be happier being the one shaping the content instead of another person doing it for me, regardless of if we would block the same instances at least I would know what I have blocked.
I would probably never browse the local feed on an instance that intentionally never defederates though, the potential to jost a plethora of unsavory people is too high (although that hadn’t really happened with vlemmy, that instance was insanely good at that)
I thought you were talking about the idea he was cleaning the servers from such content, but now I see you were actually saying he completely pulled the plug.
So yes, that is a posibility, but not giving any sort of heads up its closing or anything is just weird even if that were the case, this would not constitute a larger admission than what he already did since he already had said he was defederating from an instance to avoid that kind of content. And to my knowledge, as long as they are moderating this stuff social media and the like dont put the owner in trouble, otherwise every ceo of twitter or facebook would have gone to prison a long time ago.
The only reason I dont think that is the case is because the donation links are down. I still dont know what happened, I wish someone knew his mastodon or any other social media.
Probably it was something else since the donation links are down… Hope he isnt in some sort of legal trouble or something, and I dont want to think of worse scenarios of why everything would be shut down so abruptly
What a weird way to go out, yesterday the owner was talking about how to proceed in the future and apologized for having to block an instance
VLemmy AWOL Investigation hope the link works, if not just search for the title on search bar and it will appear.
I dont really regret having one of my first serious accounts on lemmy, at least I was part of the ride and the most annoying thing has been resubbing to small communities (now I have an extension to store my communities just in case)