The admins on lemmynsfw.com have decided to allow “non-IRL loli”, i.e. drawn porn involving children/teenagers. (Post: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29633).
Irrelevant of the moral issues that this poses, such content is illegal in many countries (e.g the UK). Continuing to federate with lemmynsfw.com will put users at risk of significant legal repercussions.
Please would the admins consider defederating unless lemmynsfw change their policy.
UPDATE: The lemmynsfw admins posted an clarification here: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826. My original argument for defederating doesn’t stand any more.
2 weeks ago: Lemmy is so amazing, create an account anywhere and you can access everything! It’s like forums but better!
Now: defederate >:(
Ugh. I get the concern in scenarios like this, but in the last couple of days every instance has calls to defederate from this or that. Eventually it’s just gonna be small islands of “very compatible” instances.
Well, guess it’s back to making separate accounts for everything!
Defederation leads to echo chambers. I’ve certainly had enough of that in Reddit!
That’s a bit dramatic. Most of the big instances will stay federated with most of the others.
Some topics that are just too intolerable to the general population will get isolated. Pedo content, Nazis, etc. if you feel you need to make a second account to go participate in those things, well you do you I guess…
Well, Beehaw already defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, a few fairly normal instances don’t federate with lemmy.ml, even more don’t federate with lemmigrad, calls to defed from lemmynsfw were there from its very first day, never mind burggit.
Like, okay I get it that it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement and instance owners can do whatever they like - but I still wonder where it leads at the end.
Well lemmy.ml is run by pretty much the same people as lemmygrad. Before the Reddit drama .ml was filled with mostly the same kind of politics. They chose the .ml extension to signify Marxism-Leninism I believe. So it’s not that surprising that some have blocked them.
But anyway, where does it lead? We’re just in flux. Everyone is figuring everything out. Instances will stabilize. Norms will be established. Everything will be fine. Some pockets will get isolated, but I believe the vast majority will stay together. Once in a while there will be some drama, some splits and spats. It’ll be fine, people will shift. Balance will return.
Well, maybe. I’m just skeptical and feel that people have more of a tendency to isolate their islands rather than connect.
And once the disconnect happens, it’s difficult to reverse.
Maybe I’m wrong. Guess we’ll see.
On the other hand, there’s the advantage that if one finds “their own” instance, they are free to speak out their mind, while in the big melting pot there’s always a risk of offending somebody by just being a little edgy. Whether that’s actually a good thing…
In time, things settle. Those that defederate too much will soon become self-isolated and that’s totally fine. Most of the servers will remain federated and will be the body that everyone wants to connect with and others may be very happy to self-isolate and not caring about any other servers or their communities.
What I do find possible is that the owners of federated servers will start to form a governing “council” that share some agreed principles for content and the allied servers would all defederate from any server that violates their shared content rules. To join the main group, you have to agree to abide by the council rules or be defederated as well (for example a server asks to join the main group, then also feds with a piracy server on the group ban list, so it gets defederated by the group).
I feel like NSFW stuff will be fine here, but the questionable, non-consensual stuff will not even be visible by the main group. The federated servers will be the content core, the unfederated servers will be like the wild west, full of questionable and potentially dangerous stuff.
Just give it some time, this is sudden and unexpected growth. It’s healthy. I think people are starting to see just how corporate social media is, and how much they are both the content generators as well as the content consumers. So steps to take back the control of how we communicate is a win for us.
With the idea of self-hosted decentralized servers also comes a responsibility. With sites like reddit, the corporation behind it is responsible for everything, including moderating potentially illegal content. With lemmy, this is on the individual servers to handle.
I think it’s a bit silly to get all dramatic and say stuff like “Well, guess it’s back to making separate accounts for everything!” just because instances allowing potentially illegal cp are to be de-federated…
It’s both the best and feature of a federated commumity and the reason why it suffers from division.
I’d say the kbin integration was a pretty big win? And there are tons of new servers coming up - I wouldn’t worry about losing a few. There are other nsfw communities as well.
De-federating from someone is totally fine, and that should be up to instance owners (ideally with some input from users)
Exactly, defederation is just a tool and it’s up to the owners to use it when appropriate and in line with their goals for the instance.
For example when brigading happened on Reddit some subreddits had to go private to defend themselves, with Lemmy the owners can defederate from the offending instance instead but still keep access open for everyone else. Another aspect is the legal side, as someone else also mentioned the content OP talks about is illegal in many countries and due to the way the Fediverse works owners of the federated instances will end up linking and hosting that illegal content on their own servers as well, unless they defederate.