Hey yall! It’s gavi here! It’s been quite a whirlwind over these past few weeks. Yesterday our lovely @yay made a post in regard to wanting to take a step away from lemmynsfw, and there was a lot of confusion from that post so I’m here now to talk about some of things that have occurred behind the scenes.
Who is hosting now?
Right now, our team is expanding and changing. @yay will still be doing primary hosting, but we now have more back-end admins and a more carefully coordinated backend team spread across time zones. We are discussing migrating the server, as well as other things. When any changes are expected to occur, an announcement will be made. This will not a profit-based project, so bear with us here.
What about the content policy? Is scat banned, whats the deal?
Right now, as lemmy expands, we will be having a temporary pause on specific niche content that may potentially risk our instance being defederated. This is not permanent, and we have no personal qualms with such content, but we need to make this choice until mod tools improve and make sure that we aren’t flooding /all with stuff that might cause issues for other instances.
The following content has a temporary pause and we will review such as lemmy evolves and improves. The removal of these communities are not permanent.
Hot lunch, blood, scat
The following content however will not be welcome on our instance, no matter if mod tools improve.
noncon, depictions of underage content drawn or otherwise (Loli/Shota/Cub/Etc), deepfakes & revenge porn (elaboration will be expanded in upcoming content policy updates.), snuff, beastiality
Furry content is not banned and furries are welcome here provided they follow the content policy as outlined above. That said, if you are posting furry content, consider posting it on a specifically furry instance as they more equipped to moderate that content than we are at this time.
Generally, we are discussing improving our content policy, and will provide a thread elaborating further upon existing policies and allowing discussion and feedback in a separate thread in the near future. Keep a look out.
Current staff situation
I have been made the lead admin for the site. We are trying to figure out a feasible situation for staffing to prevent burn out and evenly distribute content administration across time zones. We will likely be having staff apps in the future, so if that is something you would be interested in keep an eye out for that. Right now, our biggest thing is working with the limited mod tools we have. It’s really a matter of trial and error and having a more carefully coordinate staff leadership is something that would be beneficial for the site at large.
Federated And Defederated Instances
As some have already seen, some instances have defederated from us. That is fully their right to if they want to disengage from NSFW content entirely. However, if the defederation was due to a concern or issue outside of that within our instance, we would like to discuss the matter and at least make a fair attempt to address their concerns. Our desire moving forward is to establish communication with instance admins to address concerns that may be popping up, as well as just generally creating an open line of communication and encouraging feedback from them and their community at large. There will likely be a public matrix community created for the site as well that will foster technical discussions of the site only, such as sharing downtime, development, etc. I will personally be attempting to reach out to larger instance admins. With that being said, if there is any instance admin that see this and would be interested in reaching out please do not hesitate to. My matrix address is within my profile.
We are currently discussing defederating instances that may put some of our communities at risk or violate our own content policies, and if that occurs that will be announced promptly.
NSFW Tagging
Right now, we are investigating some way to completely designate the entire instance with nsfw tags by default and ways to more properly blur community icons, but there are hurdles and limits to the current nsfw tagging system within lemmy. With that being said, admins and mods cannot tag nsfw content that isn’t properly tagged, and some lemmy apps are particularly finnicky with nsfw tags. It’s a pain in the ass, but we REALLY need to be making sure our content properly tagged so that it doesn’t pop up in federated instances as untagged nsfw content. There will likely be a crackdown on said posts that are not tagged properly, so please be aware of this fact and triple check that your posts are properly tagged. I am sorry for the impending hardass attitude from myself on the matter, but this is really critical to maintaining good will with other instances that decide to federate NSFW content.
Does this mean c/rapehentai is banned?
Yes.
This interpretation of rule seems like it will lead you to spending a lot of time deciding on borderline cases. Eg if she say “Oh sir, I’m not sure about this.” does it get removed? There is a lot of hentai that lives in this space, and the mod team will be wading in to that mess if they decide to ban noncon/dubcon hentai.
And why apply the rule to hentai and not erotica?
A lot of it is unfortunately going to come down to using our overall best judgement within the scope of the law. We will try to be as specific as possible.
I’m not a lawyer and I’m really only familiar with US law, but my understanding is that while murder is illegal, it isn’t illegal to draw artwork/comics illustrating murder or to write a book that contains murder, robbery, kidnapping, etc. The same is true of bestiality or noncon/dubcon in fiction/artwork.
The only exception to this general principle is pedophilia – whereby producing or transmitting pedophilic pictures is definitely illegal in the US.
Does this policy also extend to hentai artwork that appears to depict slavery?
What about noncon/dubcon erotica on c/bdsmerotica? (which while small here at the moment, the reddit version often has nc/dubcon)
That is a good question! That will be brought up during expanded content policy discussion. I am leaning on no, but we will clarify.
During that discussion, I think it might be good to clarify exactly what you mean by banning “noncon” artwork.
Maybe it’s just me being nit-picky, but it’s very hard to tell through artwork whether the two parties are consenting or not. One might say, “oh, XXX has an ahegao face, so it must be consensual”, but IMO this perpetuates a very common/dangerous misunderstanding that a woman’s body reaction illustrates her consent… when reality it’s not at all true. The only definitive way to know that consent is present is through explicit verbalization.
The inverse situation (consensual BDSM; e.g. crying/painful face in sex) is also difficult to distinguish for the same reasons. An awkward thing to consider (at least on reddit) is that the exact same pictures get posted to r/rape_hentai and r/hentaicnc (consensual non-consent). In the latter situation, it’s just argued that the characters depicted are “play-acting” and not actually depicting rape. However, it’s exactly the same pictures…
Personally, I think it’s important to consider what’s the rationale and reasons for banning noncon/dubcon depictions in artwork or erotica. Is it to protect victims of sexual assault? For legal reasons? Or because some people consider noncon/dubcon fantasies to be unpleasant? That said, I do think that noncon/dubcon fantasies are almost as popular as BDSM fantasies (and if anything, they’re closely related), the distinguishing caveat being that having a rape fantasy doesn’t mean that a woman who fantasizes about it actually wants to be raped in reality. In some feminine-oriented spaces that I’ve been part of, broadly attacking noncon/dubcon fantasies can be considered a type of kink shaming.
As a long time practicitioner of consensensual non-consent (CNC), it is very difficult to walk the line, either in real life in a dungeon, through pictures or stories, or through artwork. Keep in mind that it is literally consensual but all parties go out of their way to pretend that it’s not, which is confusing as heck. For my two cents, in the interest of keeping the line clear while sorting through a new sexual community like this one, I would argue to keep all types of non-con out for now, and work out the details later and expand the definitions as we go, rather than contract. That’s just my two cents, so take it as just my opinion of course.
That’s very fair.
For me, as someone who consumes a lot of this genre (moreso in erotica), I’ve always felt as though BDSM and CNC are safe ways (IRL) to explore fetishes/fantasies that people have. The emphasis (for me at least) is safety.
As a woman, I’ve found that erotica, fiction, and online roleplay are very safe ways to explore my sexuality. In this sense, I’ve definitely appreciated spaces online where it has been possible to do this, even if the CNC disclaimer isn’t always at the the top of every single story that I read.
Mostly, I’m just a little concerned about the line in the OP that noncon will never be allowed on this instance, and I would like to clarify exactly what that means with respect to this very complicated spectrum of media and sexuality.
As we discuss the content policy further, we would love for you to be apart of that conversation and feedback when that post comes up.
It’s so nice to have a reasonable discussion about these somewhat fringe practices that we engage in without ad hominems and other nonsense.
Copy/pasting from a comment I’ve made elsewhere because I think it’s relevant:
Is it even practical/sustainable to police things like fictional consent? Reddit doesn’t not do it because they like it, they don’t do it because it’s unenforceable. Their rules are made to be unambiguous and easily applied: don’t post underage stuff (duh), no revenge porn, no deepfakes, no illegal stuff. By saying “no noncon”, this opens up so many edge cases that I don’t think that they can be ruled on fairly. Is incest noncon? Is hypno porn? What about femdom? Bondage? That one scene from Blade Runner 1982?
Of course I completely understand that you want to take things slow, but I hope the end result will be that, moderation/content filtering tools permitting, we’ll end up closer to Reddit’s current rules than even further away. Moderators analyzing edgy porn captions for implied consent hardly seems like a worthwhile use of time to me.
The hope is definitely to loosen restrictions as mod tools improve. Like I said, we will discuss further about the content policy in time. Think of it like a “pause”