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.
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On the sidebar, you do realize that it’s necessary to specify what country’s laws when saying illegal content is not allowed?
Otherwise, porn is banned entirely (illegal) in Indonesia, Malayasia, Turkey, China, many Islam-predominant countries.
Similarly, gay/lgbt is also illegal in a whole host of countries.
EDIT: Also adultery is illegal in a bunch of countries/states (fornication laws). There are also sodomy laws which prohibit sex for non-reproductive purposes (anal sex or oral sex). You’d be surprised by how many states/countries have these laws on the books, but they are often not enforced in Western countries.
When it tends to come to illegal content we usually are referring to CSAM, so the sidebar will made to reflect that when we can elaborate.
It is still probably a good idea to include the country the server owner is in — CSAM is hardly the only relevant law, and for instance some European countries have stronger privacy laws and some US states have cyberbullying laws.
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.
I’m so grateful for what you guys do, and I’m glad you guys are planning things to avoid burn out. I work as a developer, and know from experience that management that relies on “heroes” sucks. No heroes!
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.
Even though I was “defending” scat here, I think this is a sensible stance. Lemmy is in its early adopter stage and there are going to be growing pains.
thx 4 d transparency xoxo
I have time to create NSFW-specific tools to help make this instance a success. I know rust, so I can do lemmy dev and can create python API (and database, when API isn’t enough) tools.
Beehaw (for example) has a wishlist of mod tools and features - does this instance have a similar wishlist?
deleted by creator
I decided I was happy not knowing.
I ga-shmoigedied her ga-flavety with my googus.
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.
Lemmy’s stance is that content can only be edited by the author or removed by mods/admins - that’s fair enough. What I disagree with them about is that that applies to tags too - I don’t want to have to delete posts just because they aren’t tagged correctly.
Where do people stand on allowing editing of nsfw tags?
I agree. I wish that the tags could be applied. There’s discussion on how to handle that right now, and lemmy’s github itself is discussing it pretty in depth too.
I feel like there should be kind of feature to mark at an instance level. Like since this is a nsfw instance we should add a way to have it so all posts in communities of this instance are marked nsfw by default
I have proposed something of this nature to the Lemmy developers and am waiting on feedback from them.
Your lips to God’s ear, my friend.
Not sure if banning noncon in bdsm roleplay scenarios is the right move. Every adult website including Reddit has tons of it. Even Youtube has it
Hopefully has the side bar clarified they aren’t banned, but there can be further clarification if needed. Mind you, community discussion regarding updating content policy will occur hopefully sooner rather than later as lemmy improves.
I think the challenge has been whether to assume artwork is nonconsensual by default or consensual by default.
For example, this piece I had a debate with the mod whether it counts as noncon. The character in the image (Hayasaka Ai from Kaguya-sama) I argued would never canonically agree to doing something like this… getting her clitoris/nipples pierced and used as a sex slave.
However, anyone can argue that it’s “CNC”, such as by putting a caption that “Hayasaka secretly likes this”.
@gavi yaeh see this is what I’m talking about. I’m getting reports from more than one user that stuff is rape unless the user canonically in anime says “I would like to be tied up and fucked”
That would make literally 99 percent of characters off limits. And extrapolated to irl means I rape my wife every night becouse she hasn’t gone out of her way to tell friends and family that she likes to be tied up. Even though in private she consents prior to every engagement.
I applaud your efforts in getting this instance going, but at the same time I think it’s kind of ironic that the rules are now stricter than they are on Reddit. They had the simple reason that they are first of all beholden to their ad partners, here that shouldn’t be an issue, so it’s kinda… disappointing I guess. Well there’s another instances too, and switching accounts is just like switching to an alt on reddit, so… I’ll check by from time to time and see how it’s going, while still wishing people would employ a much, much more hands-off approach. Damn I miss the old internet.
What we don’t have is Reddit’s legal department and Reddit’s offshore servers and Reddit’s lack of fediverse ecosystem to have to work within.
Well, technically, the location of the server/hosting is sort of irrelevant for reddit. Reddit must abide by US law because it is registered as a US company, and it’s not a valid argument for them to say they’re allowed to do illegal things because the server is overseas.
Secondarily, tbh I think a lot of the attention that the admins here have placed here towards NSFL/noncon/dubcon/bestiality are a bit misguided, in part due to ignorance. From my own experience on the management team of an anime/manga server over the past decade, the number one legal threat is actually copyright claims. Lawsuits can go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and Japan has arrested foreigners for posting/transmitting scanalated (fan-translated) manga. IMO c/piracy is actually illegal and actually a legitimate legal threat to any web admin hosting them.
In comparison, the legal risk of posting fictional bestiality pictures (e.g. humans fucking pokemon) is non-existent. In fact, it’s not even illegal in any jurisdiction, as far as I’m aware of.
The no pokemon sex stuff is specifically less about the law and much more about fediverse community standards. We don’t want to get defederated and we think it’s likely that anything that smacks of bestiality and/or sex in the context of a cartoon aimed at preteens is likely to get us broadly defederated, it’s simple as that.
I can understand that sentiment, but it raises an eyebrow with me. If pokemon sex or okami (video game wolf) sex is not illegal, but banned because it’s unpleasant (by mainstream standards)… what is the basis that futanari, dickgirl, or transgender content shouldn’t be banned because (at least in America), transgender content is apparently controversial (and in some US states, illegal) by mainstream standards? Or what about furry content?
Of course, I’m not being totally serious here, but it’s a legitimate question.
Who determines what is “unpleasant” and how is that separated from (thinly masqueraded) intolerance towards a non-mainstream demographic?
Well, I’m going to say that discriminating against an entire class of actual human beings is very different than drawings of fictional animals fucking.
Perhaps I didn’t give the best example, but I was trying to illustrate that certain communities have historically been harassed or persecuted on the Internet – e.g. furry communities, my little pony, watersports, diapers, gay communities, and even BDSM (which has a long history of being banned in various areas) – and in each of those cases, they were banned because they were “unpleasant” by the mainstream view.
Lack of sufficient mod tools is big factor as well here.
I wanted to ask this in another comment, but has anyone looked at this feature on lemmy? It seems that the ability for instance admins to hide particular communities from local/all by default was already implemented.
Forwarded to the back-end team. It’s on our radar since it seems useful, thank you!
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
Good call.
One of my biggest grievances with Mastodon is that the discoverability of posts outside of your local instance is complete ass. If I search by All, my feed ends up dominated with hentai reposting bots that regurgitate content from various subreddits and imageboards. Some of these posts have ‘loli’ hashtags, which is not only morally repugnant but also outright illegal and punished with the same level of severity as CSAM in some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
This is one of several reasons why I stopped using Mastodon after a few days.
If we want Lemmy to become an alternative to Reddit, we need to put a moratorium on evil lest the platform ends up as another Voat, Poal, Gab, Parler, etc. That includes purging underage content.
Agree. This problem makes mastodon unusable for porn. Twitter has a similar problem but not as bad as mastodon.
Thanks for all your effort! I agree with most of the thinks you wrote and it totally makes sense to temporary remove some coms till mod tools improves and Lemmy evolves. My only criticism is that there is no differentiation between IRL Beastiality and Hentai Beast Stuff in the new content policy. I think it should be treated differently. I can certainly understand a temporary ban, but a permanent one seems a bit much. It was always allowed on Reddit for a reason. I think it would be great if we could rethink this. Keep up your great work guys!
As a general policy we have decided that we are going to treat irl depictions of forbidden content and drawn depictions of forbidden content in the same way. We acknowledge that there are many excellent arguments for why this should not be the case, and to be frank it was a close call, but that’s the way the policy shook out.
As moderation tools improve, and the community evolves, this policy may be revisited. I wouldn’t expect that to happen anytime soon, though.
Unfortunately, this is a bottom line for me, and I won’t be staying at LemmyNSFW (departure post).
Thanks for running this instance until now, and I wish you and your team the best.
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”
Already running into censorship issues, god fucking damnit.
Thank you for clarifying that you don’t have issues with it, but I feel like I just left a corporate shithole of reddit and have hopped over to the free and open platform just to still run into idiot censorship (again not blaming this server for just followed ng federation rules)
Already feel like giving up the j Lemmy if it’s just going to be more of the fucking same
Guess I’m gonna not to go look for servers
The good news for you is that there are unrestricted free speech instances out there. They aren’t this one, but they do exist. This Lemmy instance may not be for you, but Lemmy itself may still prove useful to you. It’s the beauty of a decentralized federation!
do you (or anyone else for that matter) know a better nsfw instance that doesn’t have censorship? idc if it get defederated, I’m making a separate account for nsfw stuff anyways
burgitt is one. But be forewarned, they are defederated from most instances for a reason. If that reason is something you can learn to do deal with, power to you. We defederated from them for a reason though, a decision that I stand by.
Our backend team is currently figuring out solutions so the content policy can hopefully loosen sooner rather than later.
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.
Is there a fix being worked on with the mod teams being “shuffled” since my own communities admin is now a bot, and we (the bot owner and I) can’t transfer ownership back to me
There is a github bug open regarding it, it’s on our radar currently and are trying to tackle it as we can. Will keep you posted as there isn’t a fix just yet unfortunately.
@[email protected] identified a cause for this bug. Just making you aware as it probably got lost in the recent admins shuffling.
https://lemmynsfw.com/comment/186309. (Sorry, i don’t knowhow to properly link to the desired comment within post/thread)
That link works perfectly! Thank you!
