Cross-posted from "FYI: StarTrek.website is no longer federating with Lemmy.dbzer0.com" by @Admin@startrek.website in !quarks@startrek.website

Crossposting here since y'all won't be able to see it now that they've defederated us.

If you're not familiar with how Lemmy/the Fediverse works, basically everything you read at StarTrek.website is hosted by us, even if the content originated elsewhere. That means we are responsible for everything here and we have to decide if we are comfortable boosting content from other instances.

If you're curious, the final straw here was learning that db0 explicitly allows hosting discussions about hurting people, which needless to say goes against our instance values and we simply don't have the manpower to moderate that volume of content incoming from their server to a degree that we feel meets our quality standards, which left defederating as the only viable option.

In keeping in line with past trends we're announcing this because is is a larger instance and don't want to leave any of the crew confused as to why something may be missing.

I don't consider this a massive loss tbh. We already have !Risa@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !tenforward@lemmy.world was already more active than their whole instance. And I'm sure @Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com can provide the noxious lore of their instance if you're interested. The only loss would be not having members such as @Kirk@startrek.website running around running interference for DDoSers like @ptz@dubvee.org. Also Admiral Patrick of the Tesseract fame, was also an admin on their instance iirc so this is a clear retaliation as far as I'm concerned, even though we didn't actually do anything to AP.

But also

db0 explicitly allows hosting discussions about hurting people

What the fuck does this even mean? Can someone ask for an example? Is this about Luigi? IDFK...

PS: Will this drama season never end? I want my free time back >_<

FYI admins

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/fediverse/p/1066667/tesseract-dev-injects-malicious-code-into-browser-to-illegally-ddos-the-dbzer0-instance

As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.

I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it's been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.

Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There's a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we've been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.

This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.

When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is "incompatible with that instance" which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.

Isn't it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don't just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn't it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think...

Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I'll doubt I'll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we'll bring up mlmym again now that someone's maintaining it again.

Cross-posted from "Lemmy Release v0.19.20 - Reduced Memory Usage" by @dessalines@lemmy.ml in !announcements@lemmy.ml

I'm planning to upgrade to this version ASAP as we've been having some RAM issues in the DB recently which is causing the "daily hiccups". I can't promise this will fix it, but I can hope. Expect some short downtime in the near future.

EDIT: Done

Looks like they've been pwned.

Just checking in with admin to make sure we're not vulnerable to the same thing.

Detailed post here: https://pen.blahaj.zone/supakaity/weve-been-hacked

E.g. the recent piracy thread about hypervisor bypasses

link: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/70464360

The US sucks right now and I'd like to be able to post memes without going to the gulag.

I see that db0 is hosted from Europe? Is there any sort of policy on information requests anywhere?

I think we should plan something for this :3

Cross-posted from "Canvas 2026 | 60 days until!!" by @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip in !home@lemmy.zip

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/14012800

https://canvas.fediverse.events/

July 18th (4am UTC) to July 20th (also 4am UTC)

Canvas 2026 is in roughly 60 days!

Canvas is an annual event hosted for the Fediverse, allowing everyone to contribute to a pixel canvas, one pixel at a time

Check out the website for a live countdown, login testing, chat room (matrix/discord), and what last year's Canvas was!

If you are a developer, check out the source, and if you're a Fediverse app dev check the docs to add Canvas functionality to your app 👀

Hi, I recently realized I've been banned from about 10 communities, the only reason given in the modlog being 'automod', as of 2 months ago. As far as I can tell I didn't do anything to deserve these bans. I've never even commented in several of these communities and none of my comments have ever violated any rules as far as I'm aware. Can someone shed some light on this?

Recently there's been quite a bit of outrage because the developer of Piefed publicly called out the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla (FAF) for supposedly using LLM for automating instance moderation. and even though many of our admins the larger lemmy community took great lengths to debunk that post, it has become the disinfo that keeps on giving (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68749575, https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/116518887925988112, https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68222242 and more)

After clarifying our position for yet another time, someone suggested we should make an official post and an instance policy to "give me something I can boost as a positive example and a sign that things will be better going forward." and given that this storm-in-a-teacup doesn't seem to be abating as people are all too happy to bring it up again and again to malign the FAF; We're making this post to once and for all clarify this situation.

History

We're not going to rehash the whole drama and the many hit pieces against the FAF in the past two weeks, but I need to post the exact situation as it happened, without speculations and assumptions that people are all too happy to jump to.

• One of our mods develops a tool to download a user's public posting history through the lemmy API, to be used for evaluating them during moderation and shares it with some people in the admin team as something in progress. This tool does not feed anything to LLMs, it simply downloads the comments locally in a text file for easier review than going via the lemmy GUI.
• Someone is reported to our instance admins for blatant zionism and genocide apologia.
• An admin uses the tool to download the accused person's comment history for evaluation
• A quick evaluation (without LLM) confirms that this is a person that needs to be instance-banned. The moderation decision has now been locked-in at this point.
• At the same time, that admin was curious to discover if LLMs can used to summarize people's positions so that people can quickly follow-up with mod actions, without having to evaluate everyone's posts manually and reduce the workload of admins writing long justifications)
• As an experiment, the admin pass the user's comment history through a locally-run open-weights LLM (Qwen) to see the summarized output. It happens to match their own decision.
• The admin decides the leave the LLM summary in a pastebin along with that user's posting history for reference. As an inside joke, they decide to claim the post was summarized by OpenAI, as they expected only our community would care about this and our stance on corporate-LLMs is well-known at this point.
• The admin bans that person, providing a link to that pastebin as justification.
• The admin decides not to continue using LLMs anyway for summaries, for many valid reasons. As evidence see the lack of other pastebins with LLM summaries.

~2 weeks pass...

• The piefed developer is banned by a different mod in our instance for "zionism". (I put this in quotes as this is one mod's opinion, and not necessarily our instance's position.)
• The piefed developer apparently starts going through our instance modlogs for banned zionists and parses all their justifications
• The piefed developer discovers that modlog justification from 2 weeks before with the LLM summary.
• The piefed developer ask quickly in the common lemmy admin channel about it, at which point our instance admin in question, clarifies that the LLM was not used in the decision-making.
• The piefed developer does not officially reach to anyone else from our admin team, despite the fact that we've reached out before and asked them to contact us in advance for inter-instance matters to avoid escalations.
• The piefed developer make the public call-out I linked above as a piece of investigative journalism. The piefed developer does not provide the comments from our team which conflict with their narrative. The piefed developer not ask us for an official statement.
• The piefed developer to this day has not amended their public call-out from the comments multiple of our admins and lemmy users leave under their post, conflicting with the narrative.

If you feel I've misrepresented any steps of this history, please let us know and I'll be happy to adjust.

Given that, we acknowledge that even though we didn't use LLMs in moderations, we allowed it to appear as if we did, and that's on us. We will of course not do the same mistake again (appear as to be using LLMs for moderation)

The FAF's stance on LLM moderation

We are aware that our instance is seen as "LLM-friendly" due to our nuanced take on LLMs but that does not mean that we, as an instance, ever considered using LLMs for moderating our instance. So we want to make it absolutely crystal clear how we stand on the matter.

As an official policy:

• We have never used LLMs to guide our moderation decisions. This includes using LLM summaries which we would then validate, as well as LLM summaries which we use to confirm our existing decisions. LLMs are just not in our moderation loop whatsoever.
• We have never passed instance data to corporate LLMs.
• We have not used any automated moderation tooling which utilizes LLMs. The closest we have is the FOSS anti-CSAM filter I've developed and shared for years now, which relies strictly on locally-hosted machine-vision models.
• We have never officially considered using LLMs for moderation, nor do we plan to.
• As a team we're steadfastly against LLM for moderation due to its inherent biases.
• If any of the above changes, we will publicly inform the FAF community.

We hope this can finally put this matter to rest.

It's no secret that the fediverse has trolls. Trolling is IMO antisocial and disruptive. We have a few on dbzer0, with one casually saying they have 100 alts. I have to say, I'm unsure how to deal with this. I'm unsure how to deal with someone this dead-set on bullying people, even wanting to recall admins. I have been told this troll probably has ASD (as offensive as that is to me) and that I can't impose my beliefs on others. But I have never banned people for disagreeing with me, my problem was that I and others were trolled and harassed. You could tell trolls things like "please leave me alone" or "stop replying to me multiple times" or even "stop following me" and that does not get actioned because it is not against the rules to harrass people this way. Look at the disengage rule, it doesn't apply to these situations. And try hitting the search button for "troll" on the rules.

I've been told yes these trolls are annoying and disliked by many (if not most) people and yes they drive away people like me from participating at all on lemmy or matrix, but that is not enough of a reason to ban. There are also trolls who report everyone they argue with and use their account solely to argue and troll. I don't want dbzer0 to be known as the place that houses trolls that get anyone who argues with said trolls banned. Report abuse was not ok in other forums, but it is rarely actioned here. The trolls I am talking about have their accounts housed on dbzer0 btw, a place that is not supposed to be freeze peach.

I know many of our users like to tell off right-wingers and libs. That can be fine if it doesn't get out of hand ("kys" is explicitly banned). I could say, let's not allow people to troll, but maybe some only want leftists to not to be trolled. For instance, one group of trolls we have is antivegan. Is that considered an example of leftists that shouldn't be trolled (and I do mean trolled, harassed - not just disagreeing)? Right now, there is a lot of room for trolling all sorts of people. One reason for our zionist rule is because we had zionist trolls that weren't breaking our other rules even though our code of conduct does not allow supporting genocide. Our anti-AI rule was because others were harassing some of our stable diffusion mods. People have been sent nasty PMs as well. You can troll on this instance and get away with it as long as it is not explicitly stated as not allowed in our rules. I have been told it has to be explicitly stated, one of our trolls is a rules lawyer who believes they were given permission to troll before their account was made.

So tell me about your experiences with trolls. How do we fight them? How can we change or add to our rules? Which trolls have been bothering you?

This meta post was finally posted in response to my comment here:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25902072

I mean this one: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68333674

It waa posted 5 hours ago and the bot already says it's concluded and the post locked. I found it interesting and was wondering what happened to it. Aren't governance votes supposed to run for 7 days or something?

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.

Ahoy, y'all!

I've been meaning to make a post like this for some time.

Ever since this post I've been thinking about the governance structure on dbzer0 more and more. I've had some good discussions about the current governance model in that post, and I've also read other's perspectives with interest. For those interested, here are the threads I'm referring to:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24353142
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24418866

This week, I finally found some time to write about my thoughts in the hope that it could start a larger discussion about how we could improve the way decisions are made on this instance.

In the mentioned post, the general sentiment is in favor of defederating from (by far) the largest German Lemmy instance.

One comment stuck out to me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24355698

u/ggtdbz mentions how they are directly affected by zionism, but are against the decision. Importantly, they make an alternate proposal: a 3 or 5 strikes system, but keep feddit.org federated, so that the (heavily propagandized) German users are still exposed to anti-zionist thoughts, and will not be able to consider theirs the default position on the subject. Many people upvoted.

Nothing further happened. There was no response by the OP, no governance proposal, no extending the timeframe of the vote.

Now I understand that someone probably should've made a governance post about this proposal, however, to my knowledge, noone in the mentioned threads had the voting privileges to do that. This structure is mostly opaque to me (and most other users, I think), which is one of the issues I see with it.

This brings me to another thing I noticed in these proposal threads: many don't seem to know how the voting system works. It isn't explained on the post itself, and isn't very legible either when people vote. As I understand it from this post, there're different voting classes, depending on if/how much a user donates to the db0 admins. But do their votes get more/less weight? These also give users a different reply image from the bot as the vote is recorded, showing either the voting class or what they said in their registration message. It explains that users who actually have a vote are paying users, mods, and select users who were vouched for by a paying user, mod, or another vouched-for user. Looking through the previous votes I could find 8 users who have been vouched for (and participated in a vote) so far.

Now I don't think this process was deliberated on by anyone outside the admin team who created it. I remember a few posts about the software to set this up being in development, and a post to announce its release, but none discussing just the structure of it. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

The proposal vote posts typically ask for a 2/3 majority from db0 users (outside sentiment is recorded, but doesn't count for anything). Here also, I don't recall any discussion about what percentage should be aimed at (although I think a weak consensus is a good idea, be that 2/3 or something else). Votes by regular members (not a mod/admin, paying user, or vouched-for) are used as a tie-breaker, although the exact mechanics seem to be more complicated.

There is de facto no discussion process that precedes or leads to proposals, and no method to amend existing proposals before or after a vote is called (see example above). There is a governance post type called "sense-check", which looks like it's intended for discussions prior to voting, but in practice it has been used exactly once for this purpose, on the only governance topic that wasn't opened by u/Flatworm7591.

This is why I would classify this voting process as majority voting, as opposed to consensus voting. A majority vote in my understanding would be a simple vote that asks a yes/no question and passes if a certain size majority says yes, regardless of any other factors (strength of agreement, strength of disagreement, amendments, counterproposals, etc.) and requires no prior discussion by those affected. I think this is a charitable interpretation though, considering the relatively small pool of users who have actual voting rights.

Now after laying out my understanding of the existing structure, I'd like to propose two approaches.

First approach, a consensus vote:

A consensus vote would be one that follows the model: Discussion -> idea-collecting -> proposal -> amendment/counterproposal -> vote -> implementation or similar, that also takes into account strength of (dis)agreements (for anything other than full consensus) and abstain/stand-aside votes.

To avoid the issue of the one sense-check post we've had, which is that it wasn't ever voted on, I think an important addition is that discussions must end in a proposal that is then voted on, even if the proposal is "change nothing".

For this consensus approach, a harm to the community would first need to be identified (there are of course other reasons to make decisions, but I'm going to focus on grievances for simplicity). Then, someone creates a discussion post on the governance community to discuss what this harm is and what is causing it. Once the harm is understood, solutions can be discussed. This could be done by first collecting ideas and then trying to merge them into a proposal or choose the most popular ideas out of the lot. Once a proposal was formulated, people can voice disagreements with it so that everyone can think about amendments that could resolve those disagreements. Once all or the most major disagreements have been resolved, the proposal can be put to a vote.

Next, I want to talk about voting classes. I understand the inherent issues that come with online spaces like these, that any meaningful power given to the users can theoretically be abused by bots/bad actors, but I think it's an issue that only 8 users were vouched for, and the rest paid for their right. Vouching should be far more prevalent IMHO, or this place will still be run by a very small minority.

This approach is not intended as "Do this thing now and do it exactly as I tell you to". I'm sharing my thoughts on this in the hopes to start a discussion about possible alternatives/reforms. This approach is largely influenced by my reading on consensus systems and experience using consensus methods in IRL organizing spaces. Books/articles I've read on this that I found useful are: "Consensus" by Peter Gelderloos, "Consensus Decision Making" by seedsforchange.uk, and the Apache voting process.

Second approach, maximal autonomy:

This is one I am leaning towards a lot. The question I asked myself was "How would anarchists solve the problem of who to defederate from the best?" In governance votes about defederation there seem to be three major tendencies:

Those who want to:

1. defederate from problematic groups
2. federate, to keep these problematic groups exposed to radical ideas.
3. use personal blocklists to "defederate" and only actually defederate from groups like, for example, exploding-heads.com, skinheads.io, etc.

I think 2 and 3 aren't mutually exclusive. However 1 is incompatible with 2 and 3.

My proposal for those who find themselves in group 2 or 3 is to find/create an instance that defederates no instances you wouldn't also add to your personal blocklist. Then, rely on that blocklist and your own judgement. Since personal blocking only affects yourself, it doesn't raise the issue of having to make collective decisions on these topics.

A few Lemmy instances that defederate sparingly do exist, and rely heavily on users who create local blocklists as they feel the need to.

Perhaps someone could even create one that joins the FHF federation we got going on here.

Perhaps we could create shared blocklists that we curate, FOSS-style.

But the basic idea is to use blocklists to cut out the middle-person, the instance admins.

Naturally, this would still depend on moderation being done by admins, but I think having the least responsibility (and reliance) on admins as possible is the way to go, even if it cannot be fully removed.

This would also leave those in group 1 to make decisions with people who already have similar views, making decisions easier, and hopefully, strenghthening their consensus.

Finally

I hope I made some people think, and I hope we can have a healthy discussion about this in the comments, if people are interested.

Sorry for the long (and rambly) post, this has been on my mind for a few months now and it all had to come out at once :3

EDIT: To clear up some confusion I seem to have caused: The two "approaches" are not supposed to be mutually exclusive. I think we can and should consider both at once.

I also wrote a lot about instance defederations in this post, but I wanted to focus on how we make decisions broadly, not how we can handle (de)federation only.

I want to make a button on my site that makes the person surf THE INTERNET, and I'm making a huge list of the most varied stuff you can end up randomly.

I want to add Fediverse sites for the person to find at random, I added the flagships of Peertube, Pixelfed, Funkwhale, Bookwyrm, but for Mastodon/Pleroma/MissKey and Lemmy/Mbin/PixelFed I want to direct the person to selected instances... and so far my whole list list is db0, quokkau and kolektiva social for Mastodon :P

I really don't know much of the Fediverse, can you recommend me more cool instances from Mastodon/Pleroma/MissKey and Lemmy/Mbin/PixelFed?

This has been a contentious topic, sparking much debate but following the Governance post (feddit.org's Zionist bar problem: community ban(s) vote), the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla has decided to fully defedeate from from Feddit.org.

It follows a model of BDS from pro-Zionist/Israeli sources, showing that views such as genocide denial are not welcome in a polite society. This further backs up the FAF's strong commitment to not supporting pro-Zionism as with its Golden Rule #8

Users had expressed some reservations around losing access to feddit.org communities, some of which have dbzer0 hosted alternatives such as !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !buyfromeu@lemmy.dbzer0.com. Others can be found across the wider fediverse such as !buyeuropean@feddit.uk.

But wait, isn't it un-Anarchist to not support complete free speech? Not at all my dear friend. Voluntary association is a core Anarchist principle, and as such exercising the freedom to stop associating with others is part of that. If the Feddit.org admin team decides to change their stance of support for Israel, perhaps the community may vote to refederate in the future.

anyone else have this issue? browser crashed twice just now trying to post and use the site, nothing else is running on my OS that would have caused the crash. monitoring htop suggests its only this tab, Im on Firefox 147.0.4. browser is also slow when I go to sort comments by top, it will freeze my OS before loading. just curious if this is a known issue or not

Unfortunately Photon uses a CSS framework instead of meaningful CSS class names, so this is a hack that simply shrinks every image in every top comment's thread. YMMV.

I can't see my any posts or comments previous to this account getting one year old. Either from the app or the web.

Another weird thing is that I can only see comments on to my new posts in the inbox, if I browse into the post I can only see my replies, as replies to nothing if I use voyager app, through the web I the comments section is empty even though it says there's comments.

PD: right now it says there are three comments here, but I can't see them. I replied to one of them, so there's one the haven't reached my inbox.

Edit: When I look into the comments sections, half of the comments are missing.

Update: it turns out that I managed to deselect all languages except undefined. That hid all my activity and a lot more stuff I did not notice.

My profile is now empty, I can't see any of my posts, comments, messages or anything. It's like I managed to block myself. From my account on .world I still can see my profile here.

edit: the inbox is ok, that one was on me, I didn't notice the unread toggle, but the other one it's still empty, there's only this post and a comment I did yesterday to test.

Hello again peeps, I come back to you with more exciting news. After last months vote passed to accept quokk.au as a member of the FAF, the vote on their end only just marginally failed for a 1-vote tiebreaker. The primary reservation people expressed back then was not wanting to follow the FAF defederations/bans as many people chose quokk.au explicitly due to their defederation list, particularly of Marxist-Leninist-friendly instances like hexbear.

Given however that there was willingness from admins on both sides to collaborate and provide mutual aid to each other due to our shared values, we went back to the drawing board to find a compromise. The main issue was that we wanted a way where we didn't want to sacrifice the tight integration of the FAF proper, but there is also an option "softer" version of the flotilla integration, which is less technical and more political.

So we came down to having two different tiers of membership in the flotilla

Consorts: These are the fully integrated members of the FAF. For all accounts and purposes, they count as a single instance, as they follow the same rules, bans and federations and their members get voting rights on all proposals. I.e. the original vision I proposed.

Companions: These are the more politically-only aligned instances.

• They don't have to follow the FAF defederations and bans so they have no say in those either. However companion instances can optionally chose to follow defederations and/or bans, which allows them to vote on them as well.
• They can take part in the voting for rules which don't refer to deferations or bans, and they have to follow those rules (e.g. golden rules, radical admin recalls etc). They are also allowed to propose new rule changes as well for the whole FAF.
• They get access to FAF private matrix channels and benefit from our resident technical expertise and moderation experiences.

Naturally a Companion instance can at any time become a Consort by simply on-boarding existing FAF defeds & bans and therefore immediately get future voting rights for those as well.

After we reached internal consensus on these two tiers, we then re-approached @Quokka@quokk.au to see if that would cover their reservations and we're today happy to announce that they've officially joined the FAF.

On a personal note: It's been always my passion to grow a system that is not only technically robust, but also politically as well, and the only way we can achieve this is by reinforcing the mutual aid ties between aligned actors, while providing enough independence for self-expression. This is yet another step in that direction and I hope it can lead to more versatile fediverse structures like feeler networks and whatnot.

Where are the servers for lemmy.dbzer0.com located?

EU? US? Elsewhere?

I am trying to move away from US services as much as possible, hence me asking.

Just asking.