30
One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of
its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka
CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly
and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age. The admin then
demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that
the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We
vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they
decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we
will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of
fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet. If someone
made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that
would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends – not
roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive – to be a child and makes porn,
that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that. One of the reasons we run our
instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don’t body
shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That
means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young,
cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some
people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.
There’s no way to draw a line that says “you can’t like adult people that look
like X” without crossing a line that we will not cross. EDIT: OK, closing this
post to new comments. Everything that needs saying has been said. Link to my
convo with the blahaj admin here [https://lemmynsfw.com/comment/683520].
The core premise of federation is that people have the right of association. It’s people core right to say ‘no we don’t want to federate with you’. The microblogging side of fedi has figured this mostly out at this point. Not sure why this is a big deal
It’s not a huge deal, but it does set an odd precedent and moving away from or prohibiting porn does ultimately hurt community growth and retention, it just does. This also stinks of unhinged Leddit power mod behavior with their strong demands based in odd logic and justifications and not reality.
Instances can federate with and defederate from whoever they want, you’re absolutely right, that’s the point, but this is also not nothing. We need to pay attention to these things because it will form the future and affect its success or failure of this platform.
Alright I think I spent enough of my day defending a porn instance lol. Have a good day everyone, it’s been nice talking to youse.
FYI, this isn’t that. Blåhaj Lemmy literally hosts porn and NSFW communities.
In effect, it is just that. It’s inevitable for an nsfw-focused instance, or really any large instance, to have some comms that some instance admins don’t agree with.
As long as it’s legal though and admins are reasonable (which they were judging from the convo), defederating the whole instance without making it clear that it’s a personal decision and not because it actually hosted anything like csam is definitely irresponsible, specially on a large instance. It definitely sets a bad precedent.
I think you may need to have another look at the announcement post
We were clear that it’s not CSAM.
To quote that post
The post then ended by highlighting that CSAM was not the reason for the defederation, rather, it was the act of appearing like CSAM