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.
You’re not being a negative Nancy, these are legit questions. Not just for our instance, but lemmy as a whole in regards to whether or not NSFW stuff is compatible with federated websites of this nature. It’s already failed big time with mastodon, and I’m currently using their failure as a blueprint of what not to do on the moderation side of things. They’ve already experienced these things almost exactly as we are. For one, lemmy is just a hot mess in the way its built currently. Full stop. This platform was seriously not ready for this amount of users at once. The extra restrictiveness of the content policy is temporary for a multitude of reasons, beyond just defederation. I don’t know how we are going to address enforcement as we grow even as we scale back the policy, but we have a team to help figure that out together now. We are hoping to decrease the restrictive nature sooner rather than later as we scale up. There are aspects in the way lemmy is built we are having to macgyver together, thankfully our back end team is working well on that. As it stands, we aren’t attempting to recreate reddit and that’s not the intent of this instance nor should it be taken as such. That’s the not even the point of lemmy and federated content platforms such as this. The point is to provide choice here, and there’s already more instances springing up with more and more each day. We may have defederated from burgitt, but there’s nothing preventing people from going there if they truly want to. I’m not stopping people from going. And that’s the point of lemmy and the fediverse. The choice and decentralized nature.
Right now, this is a big experiment. If we fail, then we fail. And that’s OK. Instances will pop up and take things from there. I have less faith that it will implode as we move forward and the team works more now though. It’s even more promising given the fact that we are having active input from someone with quite a lot of experience with hosting porn sites legally within the bounds of US law. If worse comes to worse, this site either gets completely handed over to them or they start a new lemmy site entirely with a completely new philosophy. NSFW content will exist in the fediverse in some capacity, no matter how. We are learning as we are going, and have definitely made some mistakes already. We are utilizing a platform rooted in a philosophy that hasn’t been widely utilized beyond email since the rise of the early internet and prior to the dotcom bubble. Being defederated isn’t a “fear” either, a large portion of instances have already defederated from us and thats going to continue to occur and we just keep on chugging on. The defederation aspect of it all, is due to the way that federation occurs isn’t nuanced whatsoever in a way that mastodon is currently. It’s federate or not. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. No restrictions, nothing. It’s absurd, but we are hopefully moving forward on that end.
Is there any kind of mechanism to report content to global admins?
I’ve made several reports over the last few days that I’m fairly sure violates global content policy, but I think the community moderators ignored them.
Unfortunately not yet. Could you send me a message about it?