When this instance first started, I don’t think it was fully anticipated how large it would get. The place where this instance was when I first stepped up as admin was wholly unsustainable long term. There was little direction as to what the instance’s intentions as a website were, and the specific intentions it seemed to lean towards (being a sort of reddit 2.0) is not something we have the ability to handle. Neither monetarily nor legally.
The expectations that this instance specifically would be replacing reddit nsfw content entirely is not realistic, and the expectations that have been had for what all of lemmy is capable of has been much higher than what the backend side of things is at right now. Rome was not built in a day, and the same is true for communities of this nature. We are utilizing a platform based on a philosophy that hasn’t been widely used outside of email since the early Internet, while now having to work the laws and limitations that the current Internet now presents as well. It’s an experiment, and just like all other communities we have made mistakes and are trying our best while figuring this out together. This is not a business, we are not shareholders, we are simply passionate volunteers.
Right now, our team has been paying attention to concerns and feedback that have been raised. We are currently actively engaged in a discussion of what the next steps are from here. My hasty implementation of the current restrictive content policy was not something to do long term but an attempt to reign in a community with what felt to have little restrictions and many issues popping up. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of managing a community like this. The current policy as it stands right now, has been a band aid while we discuss further how to move forward. And we have been.
And thankfully we have a much bigger back-end team than before. What has helped the most to provide insight is that we have a back-end team member who has active experience in hosting adult websites within the legal span of the law. We also have backend team members who are helping to build mod tools not just for lemmyNSFW but with active collaboration with others across instances as well.
As we have discussed rule changes and throwing things at the wall, our biggest aspect has been determining if we are on the same page as a team. Unfortunately, a now previous back-end team member decided that he was not. And that’s ok. However last night, instead of moving forward and deciding that our ethos as a team moving forward isn’t for them there was a post that was made that compiled our original rough draft for new content guidelines and attempted to pass them off as that is going to be our full go to as a community. It isn’t. We are discussing things and hashing things out as a team still but have made significant progress moving beyond what was discussed. When changes occur, we will make a post clarifying such changes. We ask for patience, please.
I still think (and have always thought) that defederation should be the least of all the concerns.
The goodwill among the users and mods is not infinite, and every restrictive policy that fragments this community further brings this instance closer to collapsing inside on itself. LemmyNSFW has a bigger brand problem with its own users/mods (and prospective users/mods at reddit) than its brand problems in the broader SFW fediverse.
The other thing is that honestly, the additional rules actually add work for the moderators (they don’t decrease the amount of work). It doesn’t really make sense to say that rules will loosen once the tools improve (it’s more like the opposite). Rules about canonical age, debating about CNC, source verification, etc are a lot of manual work to ask of moderators that they were never required to do at reddit, and if they’re not on board, they will leave (or burn out).
To expand on your second point, making the rules as short an easy to apply as possible should be paramount.
Reddit basically says “no underage, no drawings that look underage, no fakes, no voyeuristic stuff, no obviously illegal stuff (real rape porn, revenge porn, etc.)”. It’s not because they’re condoning some of the extremely morally dubious shit on there (and I say that as a true degenerate coomer myself). It’s because it’s unmanageable at scale to do anything more than set some very basic rules that any moderator can easily follow, and then just monitor the mods to ensure they’re enforcing those rules.
For instance the Unstable Diffusion Discord has a great policy IMO: Any generated image that looks underage to a moderator will get purged, no ifs, not buts, if the vibe’s wrong they set in on fire. They don’t analyze breast sizes or inter-pupillary distances or whatever the fuck, just hip-fire.
It sounds crude, but it makes the job several orders of magnitude easier than the alternative, works really well in the vast majority of cases, and is a good enough show of faith to excuse the occasional mild “slip up”.
defederation could still be used as a gauge and tool to tell what the greater consensus of the instance of the federated community is, such as potential legal problems, or going there might have other issues. so an instance that is defederated will appear to the greater community as untrustworthy especially when mass-defederated.
on your second point, while u/paddedperson posted their allegations, i am unfamilliar with lemmy to tell if a post not showing in the modlog as deleted by an admin or mod means it was removed by the user. and i am willing to let the admins respond with an action (e.g. releasing new rules) or a release of the logs before condemning them to paddedpersons allogations, no need to witch hunt on this little concrete info
as for this last point, i did not mean rules as additional rules but more post these new rules that are in development before making a decision on this entire thing