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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.
Thank you and absolutely! Our general ethos for LemmyNSFW is that with the implosion of reddit, it’s inevitable that some adults are going to seek out adult content so making sure its done right is quite important. For the purpose of the growth of the lemmyverse and keeping the community safe, we see it as an opportunity to not only learn from reddits biggest mistakes and make a new community that focuses consent and keeps minors out, but also actually attempts to foster a safe and controlled environment that other federated NSFW communities haven’t really been able to do so as they have almost always turned into a free for all. It’s an uphill battle with the limits of lemmy, but we are working through it and doing the best we can and building tools for ourselves. There isn’t a blueprint for this, we’re learning as volunteers as time goes on.
When it comes to defederation, we truly don’t have issues with instances that defederate with us. There’s no hard feelings, no grudge, not even any ounce of negativity. We respect and honor that choice, and with the limits that lemmy has (especially right now) we understand why instances make that choice. And for the overall benefit and safety of the lemmyverse there needs to be instances that don’t federate with us too. Especially in line with our focus on consent. Ideally, there will be native ways in lemmy to block our instance, restrict our content in all for instances, and the implementations of more detailed content warnings.
I will say that I personally use a different instance for SFW stuff, and I can say that I absolutely adore the people at aussie.zone, sopuli.xyz & feddit.de. The admins and communities at each of those instances are filled to the brim with absolute sweethearts and I have nothing but love and kindness towards them. It makes me sad when people feel there is some weird beef we have with the instances that have us defederated (especially those!), and I hope those instances know we don’t, we fully understand why they do, and we will never push them to refederate with us unless they inquire to us explicitly about thinking about doing so.
Same as above, if we were simply defederated there would have been no hard feelings, it was everything else that was an issue.