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.
Some users here are acting entitled as fuck
The admins are not required to host your morally ambiguous content!
There have been communication mistakes and banning the former mod as they were leaving was crass. But the mod put them in a bad spot. The admins need to consider things like the age verification laws in the us that made pornhub block Virginia and other places to protect themselves and us users. Is the answer photo Id checks, I would be mad if it actually happened, should actually just geo block places like Virginia imho. I am not mad it was considered though.
Anyone who is mad about this should leave and host their own instances. Everyone else should wait for the admin teams actual announcement before making judgments
My thoughts exactly. And on top: no one said posting your whole is is required. Black out (or put a thumb above it) the non relevant stuff and be good.
I feel like there’s an air of suspicion that the admins (I guess myself included, except I really don’t want to consider myself an admin outside of infra and code) are not being truthful. I think padded was frustrated, and that happens when you debate about something you’re passionate about. I don’t blame him, we all make mistakes and overreact, myself and the other admins included.
But here’s what happened. I’m eastern US timezone, so all this was between at 7pm-1am for me after an already long day, but never the less, we engaged in debate over the rules for over 5 hours straight. For context, Yay sent a screenshot that he woke up to over 1500 messages from us. I went to sleep at 1 and conversations continued.
It started with Mike proposing (what some of us felt were) draconian rules. I typically stay out of the “general admin” room, but gavi asked me to come give feedback. so I did and we all started discussing them. After about 2.5 hours of debate (probably like 930pm), Mike asked for people to use an emoji to show how they feel about them, the result was 2 thumbs up (gavi, mike) and 2 thumbs down (me, padded) - OUT OF 14 PEOPLE. It was not “a vote” - it was purely to gauge sentiment. And all it did was draw more discussion, almost no one even put a reaction except mike, gavi, me, and padded.
Padded got heated during the discussion and said he felt like he was repeating himself, even though I was agreeing with him and that’s kinda just how hard debates go. Eventually, I made it clear that I would not sysadmin a database of people’s IDs who want to post on this instance. Others chimed-in in agreement. The idea was dead before it started. it was also pointed out repeatedly that the tools would never exist to enforce “source only” and padded made good points that “sourced” content can be faked with a PH logo pasted over it.
His last message was this:
Then almost immediately after that I said this:
In my opinion, padded seemed unhappy with everything, it felt like his stance was that if we didn’t allow it all then we shouldn’t allow anything and we have no right being the “lemmynsfw” instance. So then padded posted summaries of the draft that no one agreed to, and then got banned with a shitty message in the modlog and the post purged as a reactionary response. Mike got reprimanded for the ban message, we regretted purging it, but what’s done is done. TBH based on the way purging works I imagine it’s still available on other instances if you really care. But we can’t “unpurge” messages, we SHOULDN’T change modlog messages.
But after he left, the conversation turned to how do we handle, and what are our legal responsibilities relating to, CSAM , how do we geoblock virginia/utah/etc, whether loli hentai can get any of us in trouble, how do we even define “loli”, how do we handle “extreme” content on the feed, and how do we determine if CNC is actually CNC and not NC.
And that’s basically still where we are still now, but we’ve made progress and I think we’re all getting on the same page. The past few nights I’ve been digging into lemmy code, including the pict-rs library, to figure out exactly how purging content works, how the federation aspect works, and what changes we need to make our instance safe from legal repercussions, and protect other instances from hosting content they may not be comfortable with.
Regarding purges, the only remaining piece after a purge is in the “admin_purge_log” table which lists the post id, the creator_id, the admin_id, the given reason, and the timestamp. This data is viewable from the “admin view” of the instance, but not to regular users. I don’t believe purges are federated.
Our instance has purged 8 posts, 3 of which were test posts, 1 was padded’s, and 4 others were before I was involved so I don’t actually know. I assume it’s involved with the de-federation ordeal.
That’s the long and short of it. Please remember, Reddit had billions of dollars to pay lawyers to deflect any liability. We don’t. I believe our current donation total is like $200 last we talked, probably more now, and the server costs were like $80 for june and expected to be much higher for July. We’re discussing going out of pocket to get a lawyer. I think a more detailed account of finances will be shared soon.
The finalized content policy will be shared soon for feedback and then hopefully implemented. We’re working on how to be more transparent with communications, server costs, and donations.
This shit is hard, I don’t get why people want to dismiss it as a simple thing. People have gone to jail over this kind of content, and even if we could win in trial, none of us want it to ever come to that.
I just want to write code, lol
Fantastically said.
This is true transparency, with screen captures and everything.
Glad you shed some light on the situation.
I really appreciate the transparency here. Thank you!
Do you think you could give us some insight on the administrative operations? Is gavi or yay or Mikey the “head” admin and ultimately they’re the one making the decisions?
Or is it more of a council that votes on policy? If so, what is the quorum needed? How many admins are actually active? Who are the 14 admins that aren’t listed on the lemmynsfw sidebar (secret admins)? How is the admin team expanding and how is the team deciding who to invite into that executive team? How can users feel confident that admins are diverse and representing their interests versus a specific interest group?
One of the impressions I’ve gotten is that the admin team is especially biased against hentai, and the hentai-related admins all appear to be inactive.
“Council” is the wrong word, and even “admins” is wrong.
The “General Staff” room is where this has been taking place, with the “Technical” room discussing much of the logistics, code, and law.
Gavi is “head admin” as chosen by Yay, this is a role lemmy has in the backend. As a result, he is effectively that. Mike is very knowledgeable about the adult industry and I think we all value his input and his perspective. I have assumed somewhat of “head sysadmin” role for now, but we’ll see how long that stays. Yay is still the owner, and the rest are members who basically responded to Yay’s initial plea for help or otherwise reached out and were accepted. At this point we have a couple folks that aren’t really active anymore, so it’s hard to say.
But we will debate until we feel like we are on the same page, and then the plan is to bring it to the community for feedback. That seems like the only way this can work. Time will tell how successful we are.
“Biased against hentai” is a bit unfair - “inexperienced, concerned, and unsure” is better. I mean, look at this wikipedia page, it’s enormous and there’s so much distinction between countries. Basically we need to enforce different rules for different geographies, and this is a legal and technical nightmare.
Thank you for describing the operations in greater detail.
“Biased against hentai” is a bit unfair - “inexperienced, concerned, and unsure” is better. I mean, look at this wikipedia page, it’s enormous and there’s so much distinction between countries. Basically we need to enforce different rules for different geographies, and this is a legal and technical nightmare.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but frankly it seems to me that your team is cherry picking the laws that you want to enforce.
In reality, >90% of the content here likely violates copyright law and/or privacy law and is illegal in a large swath of jurisdictions. Every year, there are hundreds of people arrested or sued for those crimes, whereas there is no precedent for arrests on fictional bestiality/noncon/dubcon (as far as I am aware). If your team is concerned about legality, I strongly recommend that you review those portions of the law rather than pursuing a unicorn chase on fictional/artistic depictions of content.
Many websites have a critical line in their Terms of Service that users must own the copyright or permission/license from the copyright owners to upload content. Although this is widely disregarded by users on many websites (e.g. Youtube, reddit, twitter), this rule is essential for for the hosting platform lest they be chewed apart by legal authorities. In fact, the entire principal behind a DMCA takedown request is that the party that files it claims that the user who uploaded content does not own the copyright (which should be against the platform’s TOS to begin with).
The legal implication of this is that no content except OC is technically kosher on lemmynsfw.
By choosing to ignore the law with respect to copyright yet aggressively interpret the law respect to fictional depictions of bestiality/dubcon/etc, it appears to me (and I suppose many users) that the admins are eager to ban hentai communities whereas they are reluctant to ban IRL porn communities (many of which also host illegal content).
Keep in mind that many countries also have obscenity laws – although many of these laws are not effectively enforced in many Western countries. Do note that these obscenity laws can be interpreted very loosely, and the UK has taken people to court for “extreme” sex acts such as (consensual) fisting or urethral sounding (although in most cases as far as I’m aware the accused was found not guilty).
Lastly, regarding the variety of laws between countries – the only laws that are effectively relevant is (A) the country the (server) owner resides in and (B) the country the servers are located in. It doesn’t matter if pornography is banned in Iran or Ukraine. Assuming that the server owner and the server itself isn’t located there, Iran has no ability to summon an American citizen overseas to Iranian court. I would, however, advise the porn-distributing American citizen against traveling to Iran, because if they are physically in Iran, there’s always the risk they may be arrested there.
I heard on the grapevine that the server is located in Ukraine though – so perhaps it would be prudent to changes providers on that bullet point.
I don’t believe anywhere has laws that state that website owners/admins are responsible for the content their users upload beyond acting on it once we are informed of infringement. Our responsibility toward copyrighted content begins when a DMCA request is received from the rightful copyright owner.
Part of what we’re working on is the “user agreement” too for the site, specifically that you (the uploader) are responsible for uploading content that you have the rights to upload, and we reserve the right to remove your content if we receive complaints, and possibly ban you if you are getting too many of these strikes.
Copyright is the least of our worries, from our perspective, we qualify as “porn providers,” and that is the definition that we are most focused on and what requirements and responsibilities that carries. Including a big pop up saying “Hey you gotta agree you’re 18 or whatever age your locality requires.”
But most of all, it’s child sex abuse material (CSAM). This is the #1 priority of ours, but loli is still on the radar and a bit worrying, so the focus is to be triple sure we are following the laws (including figuring out which countries laws actually apply).
Again, like I said, we’re basically going out of pocket to talk to a lawyer for this. We’re not trusting our google searches or the advice of posts on the instance. And until then, we’re gonna do the best we can until we get that done.
Speaking to a lawyer is prudent and I think it’s within your best interests to do so.
This is jurisdiction-dependent. While I’m not familiar with Ukraine’s platform versus publisher laws, Section 230 is US law and applies to US hosts and American citizens. I would suggest that you review this with lawyers familiar with the law of the country that @yay (the server owner) resides in and the country that you are hosting in.
As far as I understand, CSAM (for American services/hosts) is also similarly covered under Section 230. Twitter/Reddit/Google isn’t liable for CSAM found on their platform so long as they act promptly to remove it as soon as it is reported.
Personally, I would be a little more concerned than you are regarding copyright, if only because I’ve spent a lot of time in the fan-translation space. Websites that host >90% pirated content (e.g. manga aggregator websites) are much more vulnerable to prosecution under copyright law than a website like reddit, who can argue that they aren’t a piracy website because a minority of their content is infringing copyright and most of it is OC.
Then you don’t understand copyright case history. Safe harbor doesn’t protect you near as much as you think when it’s a clear pattern on the server especially when it’s majority use case.
You’re likely on the hook for several million in copyright lawsuit from rights holders and there’s no warning step they just come down on you one day when the prime function of your service is to infringe. They are not required to go through the dmca process if you’re the target of the suit. Why do you think contentid and similar systems exist? If you aren’t actually trying to keep your service clean of infringing content then you’re going to get curb stomped if you can’t show significant and majority noninfringing use case and that’s not counting the long drawn expensive out legal fight you’d have to make to even try that. Go ask a competent lawyer in the field and they’re not going to give you a rosy picture.
Our goal is to be a safe space for content creators incl models, artists, photographers, writers, and more to share their nsfw content, to have nsfw discussions, and to aggregate links to other sites where content is hosted safely (PH, RedGifs, etc). We do not aim to just have stolen copyrighted content on the site, and if that becomes an issue we’ll address it.
FYI, just so you’re aware – everything that you say in an official capacity as a representative of LemmyNSFW can be used against you as evidence in court.
Consequently, you can’t say: “We do not aim to just have stolen copyrighted content on the site”
As that indicates that your website intends to permit (some) copyright infringing content.
You’re basically forced to communicate: “We do not permit stolen copyrighted content” (irregardless of how tightly or loosely you privately intend to moderate the content). Alternatively, you should add a disclaimer to your posts that “these views/messages do not represent an official stance of LemmyNSFW and is a personal/individual statement” (something like that).
tldr: Just be very careful of what you say, especially as the content in these discussion threads are easily saved across fediverse instances, and people can always dig up your past statements if something ever goes to court.
Jesus. Ya’ll need to touch grass if you’re writing this much about a porn lemmy instance lmao.
It’s an issue that I’ve dealt with for a long time, so of course I have a lot to say about it.
Irregardless of how much you like anime or manga, fan translations are illegal and everyone in the fan translation community knows this. People have seen serious consequences for copyright infringement, and our community has spent many years trying to figure out how to engage in this activity without getting completely busted.
I hope that you don’t geoblock states. I understand if you must do it, but the age verification laws those states are trying to create were already ruled unconstitutional years ago by the US Supreme Court. I guess we can’t predict how current courts will rule on it, and I know being small you certainly wouldn’t have the funds to defend any lawsuit. But, with some exceptions (Pornhub being the big one), most sites have chosen to ignore those laws.
Anyway I hope I’m not too negative in my tone. I really appreciate how thoughtful you guys have been, and support whatever direction you end up going in.
Just my opinion, but I say it’s better to err on the side of caution. The big players will sort it out in time. The risk is being taken on by those volunteering their time to keep the site running, while the reward is primarily just going to the rest of us. That being said, it’s also easy for me to say since I don’t live in a state with those laws.
I absolutely agree with you, and don’t want the site operators to take on more risk than they have to. It sucks to have to try to comply with an unconstitutional law, but if it’s necessary to minimize risk, I totally understand.
Geo blocks are kind of a bad solution to a bad problem, especially since geolocation can be very inaccurate. People outside the states in question get blocked based on IP just because the network infrastructure is tied together. Heck, in the past I’ve seen my IP address get geolocated more than 1000 miles from my physical location.
Anyway, I understand why it’s a very effective solution from a legal / CYA point of view. The laws themselves may be illegal / unconstitutional, but like you said, only the big players are going to have the resources to challenge it in court.
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There seems to be a huge issue with administration lately, but you seem like one of the good ones. If things get too out of hand, I encourage you to share your contributions to the rest of the wider lemmy community, as it would be a shame for your talents to go to waste.
No one expected perfection this early. Mistakes were inevitable and I’ve made my fair share. I have been on the other side of things like this and I totally get it.
But JESUS HAMBUGER CHRIST…
The way they banned @PaddedPerson and now @NSFWusername is totally unacceptable. I’m done. I tried. I really did. But I can’t.
(inb4 this post/account is banned for 47 Years)
This is probably going to upset you to hear, but NSFWusername wasn’t contributing to anything except demanding we allow loli/shota, telling people that the instance was failing, and telling them to go to the other instance to have more freedom.
Overall, we’re fine with advertising other instances, but that instance has been problematic for us, and right now we need to focus. I’ve asked the team to stop using decades long bans, I’ve adjusted NSFWusername to just 7 days so that everyone can have a chance to cool off. I’ve also asked for better reasons on ban/purge/deletion.
Frankly, we’re just not interested in the discussion of “how to be more like burggit” - we just need to do our thing the best we can. That bridge has kinda been burned for now, we can revisit rebuilding relationships once we get our feet under us and feel like the instance is in a better place.
What about this is a bannable offense? The demands for content seem warnable but overall this seems like some serious power abuse.
None of the above justified a purge of all their posts/comments.
I want to be clear, I do not condone the actions of those other two users, nor the content that is hosted on that other instance. But something’s gotta change. This is unsustainable. I don’t know if that other site is for me yet, but I figure it’s probably better than whatever the hell this has become and at least worth a shot.
I’ve just seen one of your posts on the other site. You say here you don’t condone, but over there you say you “admire”… seems a bit of a contradiction.
Then the way you’ve thrown everyone here under the bus for being cautious with regards to drawn and animated content makes it clear to me you have no idea where this content stands legally in some places around the world.
Like it or not some types of illustrated content are illegal in some places. It’s not a question of taste, it’s the fucking law.
To criticise admins here for not wanting to go to jail is just plain stupid of you.
What’s happening here is measure and caution. This could be sustainable.
What’s happening elsewhere is doing to get people put in jail.
The Lemmy Federation is exploding and this will begin to draw more attention. Getting this stuff right matters.
I love smut. But being reckless is unsustainable, and thus I appreciate the caution and restraint exercised here.
It gives me hope that something attainable can be built.
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Again, I do not agree with everything there. I still dunno if it’s for me yet. And I never expected everything to be permitted under the sun here. I fully understand the risks of a NSFW site, and I don’t know how many other ways I can say that I get it. But I’m leaving for more reasons than just their approach to content. I “admire” their supposed stance on speech, and I don’t want to wait for the other shoe to drop.
Anyone who thinks having people give out their IDs should never be apart of any team. That’s fucked up.
That’s the law on the production side. It just shows they’ve got someone knowledgeable from running a porn site, but not an untrusted content host. Try not to be harsh on that it’s an easy mistake to make.
Can’t imagine the shit you have to deal with. This might be an unpopular opinion, but overly-restrictive rules in NSFW communities really help keep the lights on. That being said, I don’t want people to feel unwelcome.
I really hope the team can find a middle-ground.
We will. The current team has been relentless, even with everyone across the globe, we all wake up to 100+ messages about the technical, legal, and content aspects. It’s pretty cool to see happen
But still, it’s just hard.
It seems to me (coming in very late to the situation) that what we have here is a case of very rapid decisions being made at an administrative level. This makes sense, y’all are fighting fires and dealing with issues you didn’t expect. This is understandable. Expected, even. It’s unreasonable to assume you will have a consistently perfect handling of individual issues. However, much like you are implementing solutions on the backend to shore up your instance, you need to be implementing solutions to your processes as administrators as well.
To that end, let’s try to actually get some transparency out of a transparency post.
- If discussion on content policies is ongoing, when can we expect an update from the admin team, either on the current/ongoing status of the discussions or about changes to the policy?
- Are there specific items from the new content policy which are presently being discussed to a greater or lesser degree?
- Can the admin team commit that in the future they will announce these rules/policy changes prior to implementation in order to solicit community feedback, unless a legal/technical circumstance prohibits it?
- “When” is kinda hard to say, we’re all having to become porn lawyers basically. But we’re honing in, I hope this weekend we will all be in agreement
- how to handle CSAM and uphold our legal responsibilities, and hentai (where is the loli line?) and NC/CNC
- Yes we will be involving communities and moderators more when we make drastic changes. Not everything is going to be well received but hopefully people understand that we’re not actually making rules based on the “porn we are into” and really it’s just that no one wants to go to jail over masturbating.
I am very interested to see a reply here.
replied.
and here is the thing. You can go create an instance and dedicated to whatever you want. It can be niche content. And either it’ll stand or be defederated. Thats how the system works. Long as its legal you should be good to go unless the host steps in.
I appreciate the candor. I realize it’s still early days and you’re in the process of figuring stuff out, but I think I still need some more info if I’m going to decide if this instance is really for me. Given the experience so far, I am starting to have doubts. So anything that could address those concerns would be helpful.
Tbh I think things will settle down soon, the newest rule draft I’ve seen is pretty fair and not at all what you might have read earlier today (which was literally a first draft proposed by one person that we were all debating, we’re now on draft 3 or 4). In general, we’re still researching laws and requirements so we don’t want to commit to anything yet.
Hi, not much for me to contribute other than echoing my thanks for managing this instance. I’ve been too busy to post as actively on my one community recently, but I’ve continued to check in on posts in case anything needed modding under the current rules.
I would highlight that I do appreciate Limeey’s break down of what happened. While I don’t think it’s reasonable or necessary to provide a full explanation each time, it does inspire confidence in me that this instance will have a team that thinks through its governance in the future.
Some members of the admin team have publicly shared strong views and attitudes that I disagree with, leaving me concerned with the long-term viability of this instance if they dominated the decision-making process. However, it sounds like there’s potential for the team to deliberate and find a path forward that toes a balance between being permissive while maintaining a level of risk that the team is comfortable with.
I hope we can see a similar level of clarity and consideration when the next revision of the rules and guidelines are available.
well said! pretty close to my thoughts on this at the moment
Thank you for what you do for our community!
Yes Ty 🫶🫶
Lol, well that post that you guys nuked from the ex back-end moderator did bring up some concerning rules that you all were throwing around in prior public conversations. I am hoping the new ruleset is no where near as restrictive as the ex-mod made it out to be.
Unless they held a grudge against the other back-end mods and admins personally, I don’t see why that ex-mod would lie and try to sabotage the instance.
I am excited to see the new ruleset to compare how much of their claims were fabricated. Or if they were spot on in their concerns of the future of this instance.
Fun times!
Edit: Slight terminology change, @PaddedPerson apparently wasn’t an admin, but a back-end moderator. I have changed the terminology in my comment, but I don’t believe this changes the concerns.
Before the leak post was deleted, a comment from an admin (in very colorful language) implied that @PaddedPerson did this because they were upset that noncon/cnc was being banned entirely – which seems roughly consistent with my interactions with @PaddedPerson as well.
Of course, this is just speculation at this point, but I’m about 90% sure that both noncon and cnc will be banned in the newest iteration of the rules. I hope I am wrong, though.
I know we’ve had our issues, but cnc was not what upset me. It was the photo I’d verification, and source requirements.
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I don’t get why you’re acting like this was set in stone, I was effective in killing both of those ideas, and only mike was proposing them with gavi agreeing because he’s hella concerned about prosecution for his role as “head admin”
There was some very concerning language towards a mod from the ex-admin as well. I’ll admit I was on the way out until I saw that they were no longer on the team.
I think this is a good time to recall that the reason we’re all here is because of the way mods were treated on reddit. Running this kind of site requires thick skin. More so when the focus is on NSFW content.
Who are you referring to as ex-admin? Padded isn’t and wasn’t ever an admin. He never even had admin access. He was only wanting to be involved in the back end stuff.
It was towards Padded. And my mistake, I see the other person’s still on the team. That’s…a problem.
There was specific language involved. I believe it included the words “petulant child.” If you think that sort of response is inappropriate communication towards your mods and does not represent the rest of the team, I would suggest saying so.
According to the logs, Padded received a 27 year ban for “being an a–hole”.
Could the other admins elaborate? I don’t know the full story and this seems very extreme at first glance.
It was extremely inappropriate and I conveyed that to Mikey directly. But honestly, I can’t blame him. He was hurt and frustrated as the rest of us are. Padded knew directly the complexities of dealing with this and by leaking the proposed rule changes to the most extreme he knew it would cause issues. We thought the split was amicable, but from his behavior it wasn’t. It felt like a betrayal.
We are volunteers here. This wasn’t a “whistleblower,” it was someone deliberately trying to make our volunteer work on this site even harder. We are doing our best with very little. There is no blueprint here, we are learning as we go. People have this expectation that sites like this in a software in its infancy are going to be as functional reddit, and it’s not going to right out the box.
I didn’t even see that. Yeah, I’m gone. The ban is likely justified, but the attitude is just…wow. Regardless of how much Padded may have escalated things from that point.
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Yeah, the rules in there were kinda insane. I really hope the real one is basically the exact opposite.
Thanks for all of the teams efforts to keep this community going. I appreciate the time and thought the team puts into this community and the efforts to be transparent.
While my time is limited, I would be happy to assist in whatever way I can. I think there was a donation post a while back. What are your thoughts on accepting donations going forward?
https://lemmynsfw.com/post/87160
This is how we’re keeping the servers paid for. If you can and are willing, we’d appreciate it. No one is being paid, all donations go directly to paying hosting or get saved for months were donations don’t cover the costs.
I saw another instance where they listed the server cost requirements per month, and it’d be nice to see current and expected costs considering the user jump. I’d like to donate, but I don’t want it to be trying to piss out a fire. If the costs are 200$ a month, I’d want to donate appropriately compared to costs of $5000 a month. An income/expense statement would be nice. I know there are a lot of fires, but I feel like many of the people leaving Reddit left because of greed and (lack of) transparency. Having a transparent list of (projected) costs will garner trust, and help secure this server as more “legitimate”.
Hey thanks for all your work and excited to be a part of this experiment.
Question, though… What did I miss? 😅 Where are these new rules/guidelines posted?
Our new current pinned post is a our current (hopefully final) draft! :)
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Look, here’s the thing with the fediverse. If you feel that burgitt is in line with your desires as a community, go there. I have not deleted any discussion or posts encouraging others to go there. If you want to go there, I encourage you to! The deal here is that we want this instance to last long term, and their lack of moderation and restriction on content is going to land them in legal hot water eventually as an entire instance. I only add that they are currently existing in a legally murky area, and host lolicon and shotacon. If you want to be knee deep in that inevitable Interpol raid, be my guest.
We are working with limited tools, and limited options. We are building things from the ground up to address our concerns, and many of the rules are fully temporary as those concerns are being addressed. I’m not even really banning users posting the temporary restricted content either. I am deleting and having open communication (to the limits of what is possible currently) as to why. The only content that is getting users banned on sight thus far without much discussion is loli/shotacon. That’s it. That is not welcome here and will never be.
We are our doing our best here.
I think the mods of this instance and the admins should have a discord/matrix. If you’d like to have a chat for just admins, you could make a channel only viewable by admins in discord.
But I think there should be some open communication between us and the admins. If you’re unsure if we have the capability to moderate something, it should be a conversation with us to confirm or to ease that worry.
As an example: I’ve said in this thread other CNC can be moderated, and is very different from actual rape. And I think it’s not unreasonable to think mods could moderate that type of content.
But without consulting us, it was banned. There was no discussion of expectations, or what is and isn’t reasonable to permit. We can figure these things out as a community.
Also there’s the discussion of legal liability and then there’s being so precarious it significantly limits the ability of your users to post NSFW content. If something is illegal then sure he’s it shouldn’t be allowed, but, in my opinion, outside of that, you should work with your moderators to manage whatever type of content it is.
Their matrix is here (open to public): https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org
It’s good that this exists, this should be in the sidebar!
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While this is technically true, I wouldn’t give this as advice to someone who isn’t experienced with covering their tracks on the internet (e.g. buying with bitcoin) or doesn’t know which provider is less likely to share their information with authorities.
There are quite a few cases of people getting arrested for carrying around physical copies of loli/shota (or on a USB stick) in certain countries (e.g. US tourist in Canada), that for me I would be paranoid about it, especially if I was traveling.
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I’ve been in the fan translation community for many years, and we paid a lot of attention when a bunch of Chinese scanalators were arrested while traveling in Japan for tourism.
Apparently, the JP government id’d them and arrested them out of the blue for stuff they did online.
It does happen – and consequently since I’ve done a bit of fan translation myself, it’s one thing on my mind if I ever decide I want to travel to Japan.
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The main unknown variable for me is just the question of how much the NSA is watching us, how much data they’ve collected, and how much they’ve chosen not to act on.
gross, go be a pedo somewhere else
Agreed, if you want to be the nsfw server, the MAIN NSFW sever, you need to understand that kink content is going to happen and should be allowed. And you should trust your moderators to do their jobs and remove anything illegal.
Now, Loli and shoata content is a different story, thats something that I feel should probably not be allowed, especially in these early times when content moderation is not fully fleshed out yet.
That’s the theory but… What does that look like in practice?
I’ve got the knowledge and funds to set-up a lemmy instance where the rule is “anything legal goes”. The bar isn’t high from a technical/financial perspective tbh.
Except… /r/rape_hentai is illegal in Germany as far as I can tell, and I could see that being the case in many EU countries including mine (whether they’d care to prosecute is another story, but I ain’t taking that risk buddy).
But thinking on it further, “reluctant sex” is just such a common trope in hentai… potential liability is near infinite if some prosecutor 10 years from now decides to string me up for knowingly hosting such content at some point in the past.Also what even is the legal framework for unintentionally federating illegal content? If one of my users subscribe to burggit’s loli content, I’ll be caching and distributing VERY illegal thumbnails. Someone’s going to go to court to create a legal precedent on the liability for federated content, and I’d rather it not be me because I can see that go either way (of course personally I don’t think lemmy instances should be held accountable for federated content from other instances, but some courts have been known to have… backwards opinions on internet stuff, to put it mildly).
I’ve said it before, I’d love it if lemmynsfw allowed everything that is currently allowed on reddit (i.e. following US law, which is extremely lax compared pretty much everywhere else). As someone living in the “anywhere else” part of the world, I don’t think I can take on the challenge of hosting that “morally dubious” content. Some of it is legal, some of it is illegal, and a lot of it probably is in the “IDK I should ask a lawyer, and probably there just isn’t enough case law to conclusively say that it is definitely for sure legal” area.
Of course the alternative is to just say “fuck it” and host it anyway, maybe find a foreign host in Russia or w/e, but I don’t think that shields the admin for legal liability, only makes them harder to track. But feel free to do so, like I said it’s only a few tens of euros a month and basic docker/hosting knowledge (at least for a midsized instance).
That’s understandable that you’d want to cover your ass, if that’s the case I get it. But at the same time this is something that will become more and more of an issue. This is the biggest nsfw instance, perhaps it would be a good idea if it were hosted in a place where the laws are more lax to cover the admin’s asses regardless.
It’s more than just hosting. I am no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that the owner of the website is liable for its content regardless of where the site is hosted. I think lemmynsfw’s admin team is made up of US citizens for this reason, as the US is much less strict on online pornography laws than many Western countries.
Of course, you can try to host “anonymously” in a country that doesn’t care what it hosts. Torrent websites have been working this way for years. But every now and then a team of motivated lawyers/prosecutors manages to take one down and sometimes the owners do a stint in prison and/or exile themselves to somewhere without extradition treaties. The risk might arguably be lower with pornography (if you stay away from the very illegal stuff like loli), but it’s not zero.
I think hosting anonymously is not necessary if it were to be hosted in the US. They go after torrent sites because of the illegal nature of the content hosted there.
But that’s a good point about the domain owner, iirc yay is outside of the US. He could however transfer the domain.
It’s a shame there’s not a way to remain federated with a server and not have their content cache on yours. Or only caching encrypted data that’s encrypted in pieces rather than full unencrypted data.
I think hosting anonymously is not necessary if it were to be hosted in the US. They go after torrent sites because of the illegal nature of the content hosted there.
Uh… source? These people here seem to agree with me.
To take an extreme example, if I was to host CP on Afghani servers with Taliban approval, my country’s courts would very much put me in a dark, dark jail for several decades at least. “It’s on foreign servers!” is not a “get out of jail free” card. One might argue that, in many cases, hosting abroad probably does obfuscate things to a point that the judicial system doesn’t bother about mildly illegal stuff that would require significant international cooperation to fully prosecute… at least for now.
Woah woah, no one is talking about CP here, I have said in above comments, I am also against hosting Loli and shoata, and very very much against CP, we are talking about hosting a US server with only things that are not illegal in the US.
One of the points of contention was what is illegal in European countries, with the example of the rape_hentai. They often have legislation that outlaws depictions of illegal sexual acts, even if animated.
The age of consent in Germany is 14. They are not exactly role models.
lets not torch the server quite yet, quite a few of the rules they have enacted to this point have been to not get ejected off of being federated and have now stated a couple of times that as stuff improves for mods and back end code some of the rules will come down.
give them a bit to think thru some ideas and propose some rules with reasonings. as thier track record has been to communicate with us about stuff and take our feedback, thus far. their energy towards this instance is worth at least that
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
glad i didnt make any drastic moves on that other posts info then, will wait for more then 👍
I want this instance to thrive, so: If you need help, whatever it may be: Ask me, I’ll see what I can do ;) It might not be much, but hey :P
Just keep posting, upvoting, and commenting! Block communities you don’t want to see but aren’t breaking any rules/laws, and report anything you think might be worth looking into (legal-wise)
Appreciate the update and transparency
As you flesh out new instance rules, I would request a reconsideration of CNC content as I think that can be reasonably moderated.
Not gonna lie, that seems like one of the hardest things to moderate, since the whole point is to look NC, no?
Like yes there are safe words, etc, but not being someone who consumes that content, I’m not sure the distinction is readily apparent for a mod or admin, which would make it a nightmare to effectively moderate. I’d be curious to hear how it can be reasonably moderated, given that it’s not reasonable to assume that admins are familiar with that content.
What is CNC?
Consensual non-consent. It’s basically the “rape fantasy” played out by consenting adults. If done correctly, it follows guidelines, limits, and safewords. I’m not into it myself, but I’m assuming one of the biggest issues is determining true CNC from non-consent (actual rape) content.
The solution is limit to these types of subs to OC content or clearly mainstream porn. If you don’t have the source or can verify with both people in a pic/vid, then your post gets removed.
To be clear, I don’t mean to argue for or against it; I’m sorry if it came across that way. I mostly wanted to quickly summarize CNC. There is a way for it to be successfully moderated, but it will require a dedicated/knowledgeable mod (team) to keep it in check. It can very quickly become a way for bad actors to find a home.
And as far as text posts, a lot of it is stories or fantasies, so the solution there is to denote if something is fiction, and if it’s too rapey then remove it and maybe ban the user.
Just to be clear it was not “the first rough draft” it was what you guys said was “close to the final version” and you had everyone vote on weather or not it could get posted.
Anyway, I can’t actually delete the saucnaobots account, as the delete function doesn’t seem to work currently…
That’s not what the vote was for. It was in regard to discussion if we on the same page what the community core goals should be. The rule discussion was simply a draft, and everyone was adamantly opposed to a majority of the rules at their extremes. We wanted to have the discussion rolling. The photo ID discussion and sourcing rule was killed immediately.
Regardless, I’m not doing this here nor elaborating further. I will delete your bot account as that is what you have expressed.
That’s not true, and I still have chat logs and a copy fo the Google drive file.
I have no intention of leaking it, but I don’t think it’s the best sign that you feel like openly lying to the comunity about what the vote was
I truly don’t understand why you are intent on escalating things. When you fully disengaged people expressed them being against the changes as well, even before as well. The discussion of IDs and sourcing was adamantly opposed, with a major backend member expressing distinctly the harm forced IDs would cause within the community.
As an outsider, the admins look like they’re in the wrong here. You especially. You got the whistle blown on you, and you’re crying about it.
or someone decided to stab them in the back after appearing cordial to working together and eventually leaving on what seemed like good terms.
we do not have enough evidence to condemn ether party ether the admins need to act (e.g. ) or the person or admins need to come forth with evidence. so maybe keep the torches unlit for a bit longer.
in short, we have no solid evidence that they actually got called out, or back stabbed. lets see what the next move is first
Well one side presented evidence, the other side banned them, deleted it, and said it was bad form, then made a post about their commitment to some transparency.
there was no evidence only allegations (as in the post only had text explaining what the admins were doing before they left chat, no images) in the initial post, the person says they have evidence but does not want to present for whatever reason from above, and as for deleting the only way i have verified that escapes the modlog is the user deleting the post (since i have not been able to get solid info on if a post purge reports to the modlog yet) and the admins say both parties were in bad form for the actions they took with padded posting the allegations and them acting the way they did toward the post with the ridiculous ban. this is all we have as of right now.
and realize that as someone that does not know the admins at all, i dont trust them either but beyond trying to look out for the health of the server and perhaps going a bit harsh on immidate rules they havent been overly adversarial to the community. thus i feel that till there is evidence or actions that say otherwise i dont think we should condemn them to being guilty on hearsay.
about the only thing we could condemn someone for is the unprofessionalism of an admin and the method in witch someone was banned.
tl;dr: at this point it is hearsay till somone makes a move, so it might be best to wait and see what comes out in the wash. the only thing someone did that was factually wrong was ban someone unprofessionally. also, do post purging from admin get recorded in the modlog?
Yeah, but you still put it on the table before killing it.
the photo ID descussion does have legal ramifications depending on certian places in the world, though so it should atleast be talked about to some degree, and i do agree with the point that with lemmy as immature as it is (as a code base) would be dangerous to the users to implement haphazardly.
this being said at this point it is a he said she said debate. take your side i guess, though either someone needs to come forward with evidence or some action (e.g. posting these new rules), there is not much to go on, so maybe think before you leap.
I agree, hence why it was scrapped. Full stop. Limeey specifically threatened to leave the project over it as it would put women on our site in danger of blackmail. We just wanted to get the ball rolling on discussing addressing our issues. It’s immensely disappointing to witness padded decided to try and sabotage this entire project after I truly did think we parted amicably. Those rules were a mish mosh of things to figure out what might stick, it was a draft and not set in stone.
Regardless, I’m not doing this here nor elaborating further. I will delete your bot account as that is what you have expressed.
Transparency. Lol.
I’m not engaging in someone who is clearly trying to escalate things further, specifically related to padded.
I’m going to make a top level post to this, rather than reply here.
