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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.
I was typing from memory. Now that you pasted the actual quote, I realize the word “adult” was there; so not intentional and I stand corrected. In any case, my point still stands that I think the conversation between the admins could’ve gone better. Maybe the lemmynsfw admin could’ve explained it another way; on the other hand, the blahaj admin seemed to just be looking for a reason to finally defederate and seemed like they already decided before the conversation even started.
Thanks for clarifying your earlier comment.
Hard to know the true motives of the blahaj admin - could be they felt this was the only way to protect their community from a perceived evil, could be they were just offended that the LemmyNSFW admin had the audacity to stand their ground on principle, could be they personally objected to nsfw content and this was as plausible a reason as any to act on the desire to defederate. I see they are still federated with a few other much smaller porn/nsfw instances.
Someone else here mentioned that being an LGBTQ+ instance and allowing association with porn occasionally described as “childlike” isn’t something Blahaj can afford in this political climate.
They’re already being called child groomers. You don’t want something that can be twisted into ammunition by bad actors.
Since I don’t associate LGBTQ+ with child-grooming, that notion never occurred to me. But now that you mention it, and knowing the current sad state of the current political climate, that point sounds entirely plausible. Thank you for pointing that out.
You should edit your comment to remove the mischaracterization. The nsfw mod was WAY more clear than what you say.