73
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.
The purging is in reference to removing the local copies on *their *instance. Federation creates a local copy of content visited by users as a cache that is directly interated with, and then any local comments, etc. are sent out after that.
This is why posts and comments will stick around and can be interacted with still after instances defederate. Updates after defederation simply don’t make it back to the original instance because that connection no longer exists, but the local cahced copy does.