This is all second-hand knowledge (I’m not involved with nor personally know anyone involved) but I also had an account on dataterm.digital so I at least saw part of it. One thing I saw was the admin made a post on the local community saying he would be de-federating from one of the NSFW instances because dataterm.digital was hosted in Germany and he wasn’t sure of the legality of the content under German laws. Seems like a perfectly fair thing to do in my opinion. But, for whatever reason, a bunch of people from totally unrelated instances started flooding that post with horrible content that he had to moderate away. I don’t know why someone unrelated to dataterm.digital or that NSFW instance would have any stake in the issue, but there were a bunch of toxic comments.

I don’t think this was the worst thing that happened to the instance, but I do believe it was the last straw. The admin was so irritated by the whole thing that he just outright deleted the entire dataterm.digital VM without any warning and is basically done with Lemmy now. I personally don’t blame him in any way, but I would’ve at least liked a heads-up that he was doing this. I only know about it because I found his mastodon post shortly after he deleted the VM.

The people behind dataterm.digital also run the mastodon instance corteximplant.com and a couple other fediverse applications like pixelfed and misskey, but I don’t think they’re coming back to Lemmy.