I didn’t expect to be making this post so soon (I’ve only been here one week), but I’ve ultimately decided over the past few days that LemmyNSFW’s current management and content policy isn’t compatible with my personal values.
I’ll be moving to: https://www.pillowfort.social/community/Heterohentai
Pillowfort is kind of like tumblr but it also has communities that you can post stuff to (like reddit). It’s NSFW content policy is more similar to reddit/twitter/pretty much every major NSFW website, and it’s user-funded/non-commercial. Registering is unfortunately not super straightforward (they have a “rolling waitlist”; for me it took 15 minutes to get a registration link).
I’ll be giving Pillowfort a try on the next step of my (gradual) migration away from reddit. Pillowfort has been around for several years now, so at the very least it’s more stable than a lot of the brand-new things popping up now.
Why am I leaving?
I have very strong values/opinions, and I think intolerance/prejudice/kinkshaming towards non-mainstream sexual interest groups is unacceptable. I can’t support site-wide bans on fictional depictions of bestiality, scat, noncon/dubcon, and I will resolutely leave spaces that make those kinds of policy decisions.
As it currently stands, LemmyNSFW has the strictest content policy out of almost every single NSFW website currently online on the internet. Some admins have purported that these bans are for legal purposes, however my own personal impression from my interactions with some admins over the past few days is that the motivation for these content bans is moralistic/populistic rather than grounded in legitimate legal concerns.
I can’t begin to explain how hurtful it is to be in environments where other people judge you for your fetishes. On the Internet, I consider myself to be a fairly rare minority (a straight woman who posts hentai), and I have a long history of going through spaces where users are attacked for liking something that mainstream people consider to be “immoral”. While it may not be apparent from the artwork that I post here, I do have a noncon/dubcon fetish (from the victim’s perspective), and it’s probably around 50% of the NSFW content that I consume on the internet as a whole.
Myself aside (I’m not an isolated example, after all), there are many examples of how this kind of moralistic paternalism is harmful. Do we really think that we’re helping anyone by running around and shouting at people that they’re immoral for looking a pictures of pokemon having sex? Are we helping prostitutes by banning prostitution (for immorality) and driving them to less safe and less regulated spaces?
There seems to be an unspoken implication that: “People who read fictional noncon erotica must be predisposed to becoming rapists, therefore we should ban noncon erotica” – but really there isn’t any concrete evidence that this is the case, otherwise violent video games with machine guns would have been banned ages ago.
The negativity here over the past few days has really been unbearable. Every day, it feels like there’s discussion about banning something new, or pointing the pitchfork at something else. LemmyNSFW feels like it is possibly one of the most intolerant NSFW communities that I’ve been on in the internet in recent memory, and it operates under a guise of moralistic paternalism, which is honestly leaves me feeling very sour.
We’re all adults here. I don’t need anyone to tell me that I can’t read (or it’s immoral to read) (or even worse, the bullshit claim that it’s illegal to read/write/draw/post) fictional hardcore BDSM erotica that contains slavery/noncon/etc.
Naturally, if this place thinks that appealing to lemmy.world (the federation of SFW lemmy instances that have threatened to defederate) is more important than appealing to their own users… first of all, that logic makes absolutely no sense. Since when does a country prioritize the opinion/approval of overseas foreigners over the interests of their own citizens?
The reality is that banning communities, even “temporarily”, utterly destroys the trust that affected users have. To use an analogy, it is 100% unacceptable for an LGBT community to “temporarily” ban their transgender members. What kind of message does that even send? Do you think they would really want to come back? Even threatening a ban destroys the trust, and it damages the integrity of a community to a far greater extent than I think the admins may realize.
Basically, I’ve decided that it’s not worth my energy to invest my time here, particularly as this instance conflicts fairly strongly with my personal values. It’s absolutely within the admin/owners’ powers to create arbitrary rules and policies that they want, and likewise I’ll come and go to the spaces online with my own feet.
Thank you to everyone who commented here during this short period of time, and I apologize for the rant (it’s not particularly on-topic for c/HeteroHentai). Maybe we’ll see each other somewhere else on the Internet in the distant future.
-xy
I am sorry to see you go. As I explained, our desire was not to try to create an air of seeming anti-kink. Lemmy is a growing platform with limitations, and we are having to make hard choices to work with such limitations. I hope that you find a digital community you feel more comfortable in, and I am sorry that it is not here.
If I’m able to provide any feedback, one area of concern for me was the lack of any good-faith attempt to negotiate intermediate solutions with affected users aside from of flat-out banning communities with little to no prior notice (which, IMO, should only occur as a last resort). This is pretty much one of the reasons why I left reddit (with respect to Apollo/spez).
While I understand that the moderation tools here are limited, it was not hard for me to find that the lemmy github has already implemented some features allowing communities to be hidden from local/all (it was implemented in 2022), and in my opinion, the presence of scat or bestiality isn’t so desperately urgent of an issue that it can’t wait 1-2 weeks for a patch to be made here. As far as I can tell, no one (and no other lemmy instances) was actually complaining about bestiality hentai until the admins chose to ban it here. To me, it looks as though the admin team is trying to aggressively fix issues that aren’t broken.
Does it really make sense to ban SFW artwork from here when it hasn’t been a problem?
Many of us here at lemmy ran communities on reddit, and we are experienced moderators. I can say personally that the amount of spam/illegal content that I’ve needed to deal with on c/HeteroHentai is magnitudes less than the content I dealt with on reddit. At the end of the day, perhaps it might be worthwhile to ask community moderators here if they feel like they are overloaded with illegal IRL content before taking preemptive measures to ban everything under the sun.
On most other spaces that I’ve been part of, there are many intermediate solutions and approaches that communities have taken short of banning the communities entirely. For example:
- Noncon/dubcon content must be clearly warned in the post title
- Noncon/dubcon content must go inside a spoiler (for here, you could say that the image must go inside the post body so it doesn’t show while scrolling)
- Fictional noncon/dubcon is allowed, but the community/post cannot promote or encourage noncon (IRL)
- Drawn noncon/dubcon is allowed, but realistic appearing artwork (or rendered 3D artwork) isn’t
There are many variations on these types of rules that I’ve seen in many places, and they’re are magnitudes better than simply banning scat/bestiality/etc without giving it a second thought. The lack of consideration given towards this issue and the apparent bias of the current admins to IRL NSFW content over drawn/fictional NSFW content is very discouraging.
It’s honestly hard to truly emphasize the temporary nature of the current content policy beyond what’s been said. There’s far more that goes on behind the scenes here and across lemmy, and honestly I truly don’t know how to explain just how limited lemmy is as a software short of giving you admin to see yourself. This community was very poorly managed prior to me stepping up and was becoming a liability to the rest of lemmy as a whole. It’s been a learning experience, and many mistakes have been made. As it stands currently, I have attempted to have discussions as to the best of ability with community moderators and explained the temporary nature and my desire to discuss further as things change.
While I understand that the moderation tools here are limited, it was not hard for me to find that the lemmy github has already implemented some features
This doesn’t address some of our most glaring issues, and even more so it’s not even available on the front end currently. There’s more than just this fix that needs to occur for the content policy to be loosened. There was discussion for a time to split the instance into drawn/fictional and IRL and that wouldn’t have addressed half of our issues and created a dozen more.
To be quite honest, it feels like you have much higher expectations compared to what lemmy is currently actually capable of. I have no ill will towards you, and am sad to see you go but I think that at this point this instance probably just isn’t for you.
We may have defederated with burgitt.moe but if you desire to go there, there’s nothing preventing you. I explicitly don’t delete people encouraging others to go to burggit. Beyond the fact that would stupid as hell to, the choice to move to an instance thats more closely aligned with what you desire is the overall appeal of the fediverse. I am aware of their open hostility to my current decisions, and respect their feelings and desire to go the opposite direction to this instance generally.
I explained a bit more overall in the background to the decisions made in this post.
Exactly. They just ban people without warning or any wanting to sort things out
The only people we have banned thus far without warning is people posting loli/shotacon, usually directly from burgitt. right now posts that are in the temporary content policy aren’t even really being used to sanction users.
Hoping the best for you. I really enjoyed the more Ecchi content you posted. Hell, it even helped me a little with discovering what I enjoy in adult art.
Hopefully the instance will get to a point where the values between you and the instance are more in line. I fully agree with your stance on fictional content, but while the scat issue was a little more out of the blue, the loli and bestiality stuff I can definitely understand being a concern.
Wish I can say I’ll make an account on pillowfort, but the reason why I moved to Lemmy to begin with is because the open-source nature of it is really important to my values. However, I’ll be sure to check in every now and again to see what new content you post there.
Best wishes!
I think burggit.moe is a better place for hentai in general. But LemmyNSFW will be full of onlyfans bots very fast.
I appreciate you putting this out there for folks to think about. Their policies don’t currently impact me very much, although I do browse some more niche areas from time to time out of curiosity, I haven’t thought much about why being as open as possible is important because I had limited personal impact.
If the rules are based on what folks personally don’t prefer to see rather than legal issue resulting in actions against the site, things can accelerate quickly. When the real issues like content hosted on reddit/twitter servers, copyrighted photos like onlyfans/metart, DCMA and EU notices, under 18 postings, things could get very vanilla if they’re not careful.
Maybe things will improve as time goes by. There is a lot to learn about hosting NSFW content at scale that I couldn’t even imagine. It does seem like the statements they’ve made are open ended for further improvement if moderation tools get better.
Or maybe that’s the point of federation. This isn’t the place, host something small and join it in to the community.
The thing we’re learning about the fediverse, though, is that it’s hard to build a community in a small server. When it’s not here, it’s almost invisible. If this thing survives, one of the most important things is to provide better navigation for global content as well as SSO in some form. So if you make your own place it’s not like exile.
I’m not sure I’ll do anything different right now, but thanks for giving me something to consider as things develop over time
I’m sorry to see you go. I’ve appreciated your posts here.
Thank you for this writeup. 100% with you
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It’s not borderline illegal – it’s just plainly legal.
Otherwise you’re calling for banning Game of Thrones from bookshelves and HBO.
Im sorry, this post doesnt seem to be an image (It may be something like a reddit gallery?) I can not currently check these :/
Ran into an unhandled exception when running this through Trace.Moe. sorry
