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.
I have been thinking about the whole tagging problem a bit in the last few days and I feel NSFW or even multiple levels of that are not really going to be enough.
For almost any given kink and even just gender and body types or parts displayed there are going to be users who are looking for that content, users who can take it or leave it, users who do not want to see that content in their feed, users who might get into legal trouble if someone sees it on their screen, users and instances who might get into legal trouble if they download that content,…
And of course which user is in which group for any given type of content varies by their preferences, jurisdiction or even where they currently are (home, in public,…).
So I think content will need to be tagged in some way with the type of content and instances and users will need to have configurable filter rules, possibly even multiple rulesets to switch between for home and public.
It is probably not sensible to try to make one global set of possible tags for a federated system like Lemmy.
There might also be some other non-kinky concerns that could be integrated into a filter system like that like text VS audio vs video,… or languages or content warnings for discussions of sensitive topics.
For the actual tagging system it might be useful to look at other websites like f-list, e-hentai or the various picture hosting sites with tagging. Personally I think something with tag pairs or tuples might be useful in a porn context since a lot of kink preferences are gender specific (e.g. people might like anal with a female recipient but not with a male one or vice versa).
Another issue is, of course, who is allowed to add, modify, or move tags and if communities will have a default set of tags for their posts. Tags might also need a flag to display content tagged with it by default or not.
I think I rambled on long enough but I thought some discussion on the topic could be useful, especially while there are few resources to implement things and considering it would be good to get it right on the first try.
Tagging seems like overkill for a MVP. To start instance operators should probably just get a toggle “This community should be displayed on All locally and on other instances” that they can turn off for individual communities.
Later a more sophisticated system can be built.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I was looking through the lemmy source and I think some of these features might already be implemented. Perhaps the person working on git.lemmynsfw.com can check it out?
As mentioned in my post above, I do not think most NSFW content is actually like that, where the same set of users considers the same content to be undesirable.
It might certainly be a bit better than the current state of affairs but then you also need support across the fediverse for the flags you describe so it will take a while to spread and would still only allow the moderator of the community and maybe the instance admin of that community to control what is seen in the general feed.
We shouldn’t close the door on what you describe, I think it is the right direction. The problem is that it is complicated and will require an RFC process that will take time. Lemmy has two core developers at the moment. The devs are in “put out fires” mode, not "design robust architectures for the next 10 years mode.
Meanwhile instance operators need to chose between banning content they may actually want, and getting de-federated. If this runs on too long, the ecosystem will deteriorate. We need something that could be developed and deployed in < 1 month. What I’m proposing is “good enough” to prevent banning and de-federation. This will keep the system together long enough to get to the more sophisticated architectures.
Honestly, at the current state of Lemmy I just don’t see porn and non-porn instances federating as a good idea. The system would need a whole redesign to avoid storing the porn content on the other instances at all for most instance owners to even consider it. That problem is a lot larger than merely hiding the extreme kinks or all porn posts from the All feed of other instances.
A instance-side flag that sets nsfw-tagged posts to “link, don’t cache locally” is a pretty simple option, I think.
The real question is if there is any benefit at all from federating content that is consumed in very different contexts at all. I mean even if you filter it down to exactly the content you prefer, do you really want your porn consumption interrupted by the latest political news in the same feed? Even if you are interested in both types of content you might not want it at literally the same time.
Similar arguments could also be made for instances meant for children heavily limiting their federation of course to avoid contact with material not meant to be seen by children (news and porn alike).
That’s a decision best left to the individual, I imagine.
I think with tagging, they’ll need to be Lemmy-wide (or Fediverse-wide) tags to be useful. That or the tags themselves will need to travel over federation with the post (but then you have problems with localisation, etc).
I guess you could do something like have the tags be represented as text at the start of the post e.g.
[nsfw] [bondage] [ai]then at least others get some use out of it, and perhaps apps/browser plugins could add support.I don’t have numbers on how many people view here from this instance or their own, but let’s say if half of the audience can’t use the tags then it’s not that useful, and may well end up with a lot of support requests (Lemmy confuses people enough as it is).
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the more customisation done to this instance, the harder it will be to update to later versions. Of course, one nice way out is to submit the changes to the main codebase one they’re tested here.
I agree that it would have to be Lemmy-wide to be useful, however I do not like inline tagging, that would make it harder to allow others to edit tags and might also only display the tags in shortened versions of the post in previews.