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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 know it may seem like empty platitudes, but I want to make it clear for anyone reading this that our entire team agrees with more native ways in lemmy to block our instance as well as ways for instances to limit our content from federating into the all page. The fact that there is a lack of distinction between NSFW and pornographic content is extremely problematic as well, and ideally long term lemmy will receive content warnings like other activitypub platforms.
Porn isn’t for everyone, but people are going to seek it out regardless. A space such as lemmyNSFW needs to exist to allow the people who seek such content out to be able to do so in a safe and controlled environment that focuses consent as a key principle. And in line with having the key princple being consent, making sure people who do not want to see content from our instance are able to block such content with ease is a no brainer.
Our team has also taken a step back and looked to what critiques there are in regard to our instance, as well as preemptively engaging with other instance admins as well. The conversations being had are important, and we are actively figuring out how to best navigate them.
Also, for those who may have difficulty believing in this position, heres a reply I made 20 days ago to the connect apps comm when a proposal was made to block instances. https://lemmy.ca/comment/857085