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CosmicGiraffe @lemmy.world

2y ago

Defederate lemmynsfw.com?

The admins on lemmynsfw.com have decided to allow "non-IRL loli", i.e. drawn porn involving children/teenagers. (Post: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29633).

Irrelevant of the moral issues that this poses, such content is illegal in many countries (e.g the UK). Continuing to federate with lemmynsfw.com will put users at risk of significant legal repercussions.

Please would the admins consider defederating unless lemmynsfw change their policy.

UPDATE: The lemmynsfw admins posted an clarification here: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826. My original argument for defederating doesn't stand any more.

162 comments

If any illegal content would be posted there, let us know. If it's 1 community, we can block the community. If it's all over the place, we can defederate. But I see defederation as a last resort. If there are other ways to keep our server safe I prefer that.
- Thank you for taking the conservative approach to moderating instead of nuking from orbit.
- They did make a poll and then later announced they'll be banning underage anime art and IRL imagery . But not art of cute/short characters because it's impossible to discern if they're over 18 or not. It's the whole Pokemon debate all over again.
- I think it's worth pointing out that legality depends on jurisdiction and while it's obviously a requirement to obey the your (and other admins') local laws, it's not quite so clear-cut when it comes to other countries.
  Eg. It's illegal to criticize Hong Kong's government under their National Security Law. But I think we'd (the community here, not just you and me) agree that lemmy.world has absolutely no obligation to follow that law.
  
  Also worth pointing out in crimes of this manner intent also matters in many places.
  If someone sends you that shit out of the blue, or you scroll by it while browsing the internet, there wasn't a damn thing you could do. If you saved the image now we have a problem, ideally you take steps to ensure you won't see that image or anything like it again but I don't even think that would be legally required in alot of places...
- Also, when you set Type to Subscribed in Settings the front page default feed only contains posts from communities you have actually subscribed to.
  This does not prevent lemmy.world from accidently hosting illegal content, but it helps to protect your own feed from unwanted stuff.

2 weeks ago: Lemmy is so amazing, create an account anywhere and you can access everything! It's like forums but better!
Now: defederate >:(
Ugh. I get the concern in scenarios like this, but in the last couple of days every instance has calls to defederate from this or that. Eventually it's just gonna be small islands of "very compatible" instances.
Well, guess it's back to making separate accounts for everything!
- Defederation leads to echo chambers. I've certainly had enough of that in Reddit!
- That's a bit dramatic. Most of the big instances will stay federated with most of the others.
  Some topics that are just too intolerable to the general population will get isolated. Pedo content, Nazis, etc. if you feel you need to make a second account to go participate in those things, well you do you I guess...
  
  Well, Beehaw already defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, a few fairly normal instances don't federate with lemmy.ml, even more don't federate with lemmigrad, calls to defed from lemmynsfw were there from its very first day, never mind burggit.
  Like, okay I get it that it's not a drop-in Reddit replacement and instance owners can do whatever they like - but I still wonder where it leads at the end.
- With the idea of self-hosted decentralized servers also comes a responsibility. With sites like reddit, the corporation behind it is responsible for everything, including moderating potentially illegal content. With lemmy, this is on the individual servers to handle.
  I think it's a bit silly to get all dramatic and say stuff like "Well, guess it’s back to making separate accounts for everything!" just because instances allowing potentially illegal cp are to be de-federated..
- I'd say the kbin integration was a pretty big win? And there are tons of new servers coming up - I wouldn't worry about losing a few. There are other nsfw communities as well.
  De-federating from someone is totally fine, and that should be up to instance owners (ideally with some input from users)
  
  Exactly, defederation is just a tool and it’s up to the owners to use it when appropriate and in line with their goals for the instance.
  For example when brigading happened on Reddit some subreddits had to go private to defend themselves, with Lemmy the owners can defederate from the offending instance instead but still keep access open for everyone else. Another aspect is the legal side, as someone else also mentioned the content OP talks about is illegal in many countries and due to the way the Fediverse works owners of the federated instances will end up linking and hosting that illegal content on their own servers as well, unless they defederate.

As a federation shouldn't we start with Diplomacy? This is a prime example. We didn't wait long enough, and it was clarified rather quickly.
Defederation should require more deliberation and unless an immediate emergency shouldn't there be other actions under consideration first.
- I think there should at least be some type of poll or mod to mod discussion on having them try to combat it on their end.
  I'm not sure if that's sustainable but I thinm Lemmynsfw is the best porn content on here currently, and it seems that people like porn.
  I agree there should be diplomacy first.
  But I guess now, a CP free nsfw instance will start to gain traction and well be alright long term as things sort themselves out.

I wish there was a way to exclude the whole instance from my personal feed without requiring admins to defederate it. Right now I have to play whackamole with new communities popping up. And it's not just the NSFW stuff.
- I'm taking the opposite approach, that is, instead of blocking what I don't want to see, I join what I do want to see.
  Blocking is not effective if you want a "curated" feed IMO, new communities are being created all the time, especially now that many are migrating over from reddit, you might never "end" blocking stuff.
  OP post is a different situation though, that kind of content is illegal in many countries (especially EU), just being federated with them could pose a legal risk, it's not just stuff some people don't want to see.
  
  I've been browsing through new as a way of finding communities to join. The NSFW stuff in that feed is unideal but easy enough to ignore, whereas content that could send me to jail is a whole different ballgame.
  
  You can make this even nicer, just originally join instance that doesn't federate with nsfw, and then make another account to lemmynsfw instance, and add both of them to client. You can with one click jump between accounts at least in jerboa.
  This makes a nice experience to control what you see and when
- You can turn off the ability to see NSFW posts in your profile. It's not ideal since some NSFW isn't porn, but I'd rather miss a handful of things than spend all day blocking porn and fetish subs
- I have always hated "NFSW" being such a large blanket. NFSW does not exclusively mean "porn".
  
  They really need to add in an NSFL feature
  
  I agree, there are some memes that are NFSW while not being porn at all, I wish there was a way to distinguish them.
- Yeah a lot have been asking for this, hopefully it can be added.
  
  Open source, so I’m sure someone can. Platform is very young - I suspect that as it gains popularity, more people will contribute to source, and we’ll eventually see more options for customization. Both at the user level and the instance level giving people more reasons to choose other instances over just population of it.

Why would we need to defederate? Just don't subscribe to their communities and you won't see their content
- That's the case for anything that anyone posts on any federated server.

They did post an update about it
Looks like its less about blatant loli/shota content and more about "characters who are petite/young-looking but not obviously underage"
How and if that changes anyones feelings about it is up to them.
- I don't care about drawings, there are no victims, but if it's illegal by law it poses a problem.
- Pretty sure we are hosted on Hetzner in Germany, which makes this very problematic, especially if the admins of lemmynsfw aren't able to properly identify illegal content right away and it spreads through the whole network.
- "characters who are petite/young-looking but not obviously underage"
  yeah of course they're not gonna come out and say "yeah we want to host and share drawn CSAM" and they're going to be weasely and sneaky about it, do you really plan to take pedophiles and pedophile enablers at the honor of their word here

I think those countries should put the resources used to go after neckbeards fapping to drawings to investigate people trafficking real children.
- the venn diagram is a circle
  also, that aside, "the resources" here are a little different, mounting investigative operations to bust lolicons/pedophiles (same thing) requires more resources than just flipping the switch off on some pedophile's ability to communicate freely
  
  Are you the kind of person that says people playing FPS games are more likely to become mass shooters?
  It might not be our liking but loli is at worst a victimless crime, not the same as the real pedophiles (eg Epstein's associates, like Prince Andrew). I think by saying they're the same, you're actually belittling the gravity of the other.

NOT true. There is an update for clarification: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826
- Thats good to hear, will edit the OP to add it. I do think my post is a fair representation of the original update though.
  
  Yeah, when I read it I also was like WTF?
- im not a pedo 🫤🤷‍♂️ I thought loli meant for teen people like 18-25.

It feels like partitioning off the NSFW stuff is maybe not a bad idea. Seriously, this might be an area where having multiple Lemmy instances is a good thing. It’s still there, and accessible to anyone who wants it, but folks scrolling Lemmy at work don’t have to worry about something they don’t want to see at the moment showing up. Nobody is saying it can’t exist, but most people don’t have their porn in the same place as their regular reading! So why should it be included in the SFW instances?
- You can simply not activate the "show nsfw" checkbox and you will never see that stuff in your feed
  
  Not true, I've checked it and I still see a ton of posts in porn subs that aren't marked as nsfw. Not the end of the world but still somewhat annoying.
  
  please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this will even block a video on a normal feed with a lot of swearing if someone marks it NSFW.
  
  @Alexmitter
  I've noticed that that doesn't always work. User profile pictures can be NSFW and still be shown. And the 'random' posts box will show NSFW images sometimes as well.
  It's something to be looked at to make sure all the edge cases are covered, so that the "show NSFW" check box being unchecked actually does prevent all NSFW stuff from being shown.
  I'm not worried about it too much. It's just growing pains as the #threadiverse gets on its feet. The devs will fix it in the code, and until then the user can block stuff manually, which is what I have been doing.
  @CosmicGiraffe @d00phy
  
  True, but all this talk of whether or not to federate… It feels like everyone wants to be all nice and inclusive because that’s how we’re supposed to be to people, but in this case the way the fediverse works kind of lends itself to organically separating SFW and NSFW instances. It just kind of makes sense.

UPDATE: The lemmynsfw admins posted an clarification here: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826. My original argument for defederating doesn’t stand any more.
Drawn a.k.a. not real and not obviously underage a.k.a. not attempting to depict illegal situations, doesn't seem like a problem.
Although I agree there should be more ways to filter instances, per user. A blacklist along with the whitelist that is subscription. Show local, show subscribed, show everything (except blacklisted).

Looking a bit they are struggling to come up with a comprehensive policy. Thats gonna be a giant pain in the ass. I wish them luck. In the meantime I'd have a bit of patience and just report anything that is illegal.

Note: admins can delete remote communities without having to block the whole instance.
If lemmy.world admins clicked on "remove" on the offending remote communities that would block them but keep access to the rest of the instance.
That said, I understand the concerns.
- This would be preferable. There are some communities I follow over there I'd like to still have access too.
- That would be optimal if it is possible.

At least with jerboa you can turn off NSFW so you don't need to see it. Alternatively just stick to local or subscribed and you don't have to worry about seeing anything.

Edit: They've made an update claiming it was bad English. https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826 - I think they should take a harder line but I will have to continue monitoring it to decide if I want to keep federating with them. Not a good look tho.
Original comment:
God damnit, I was glad there was an NSFW instance WHY did they have to go do some shit like this
Welp, as an instance admin I'm probably gonna have to defed them.
Those admins are fools. They say they're not into it, but don't want to prevent others from it.
Well guess what, it's like the Nazi bar thing. You can't just let them be. They're intolerable to most people so by not banning them your other customers will leave. Congratulations, you now run a Nazi bar.
I foresee most users on lemmynsfw leaving, and it basically just becoming a pedo site.
- Except it doesn‘t seem to be true…
- Ngl your bar analogy is one of the best descriptions of "free speech" platforms i've ever seen.
  I'm all for free speech irl, where there are actual consequences for being a dick, but anonymity + total free speech online has ended in disaster every single time.
- I don't know man i think Nazi were allowed to go crazy because most and/or influential people found it beneficial in the time and place. It didn't happened everywhere. Just as communism etc.
  Not that it matters with banning NSFW content. I've never got why would people access that via forum anyway.
  But i can imagine banning news for posting from sources that are not inline with admins visions or banning science and technology community for being very religious and vice versa if you know what i mean.
  
  I don’t know man i think Nazi were allowed to go crazy because most and/or influential people found it beneficial in the time and place.
  I wasn't making a statement about the spread of fascism across a society.
- perversion or something idk.
- Doesn’t know the internets rule 34
  Gets upset…
  I know it. I have no problem with 99% of it. But if it involves children, real or not, I want nothing to do with it. I don't want users who want that on my instance. I don't want that content touching my servers.
  have no reason to moderate it away unless it’s illegal where they are hosted (lolli isn’t in most countries)
  It is in some, and in any case just because it might be legal doesn't mean it's okay.
  
  Drawn CSAM is illegal in Australia, Canada, and most of Europe, as well as several states in the US. People have been prosecuted successfully for possessing loli in the US and UK. It's not as unusual as you think.
  
  hey friend have you considered that maybe we shouldn't be adhering to archaic and unenforced "rules" made by christofash pedophiles on a mass shooting message board because of "DAE Le Rule 34? XD"

A quick glance at the post gave me the impression lots of people from that instance are against the change. I’d wait and see how things settle before defederating. Defederating is detrimental to lemmy/kbin growth, it should be a last resort approach.
- The problem with that approach is that it puts users here in legal jeopardy. Right now if I browse "All" rather than "Local" I'm risking jail time
  
  Not really, mens rea is a pretty universal requirement to be committing a crime

The other issue is that lemmy.world users that subscribe to it will cause the content to be cached on this server too which could create issues for the admin.
- You got it wrong unfortunately. We basically interact with a copy of the federated instance, that lives on lemmy.world. Each change or comment we make gets synced with the true instance and vice versa.
  Which also means that if a single user causes for example a child porn community (I don't care if it's drawn or not, I don't discriminate between pedos) to be federated, we would now be hosting child porn on Hetzner servers located in Germany and Ruud would be in pretty serious trouble.

Wow the potential for a /c/lemmydrama is already brewing with that admin's responses lol.
I see what they mean about petite/young looking people, but is this the hill they really want to die on? They're making proper moderation more difficult for themselves by splitting hairs.
- potential for a /c/lemmydrama is already brewing
  This whole place is so far up its own ass you don't need a separate community.

With AI-generated images too this is a real minefield.
Honestly I'd rather we just de-federate from porn instances entirely, people can sign up there directly if they want that.
- I wouldn't have any issue if:
  1.) it were moderated at least semi-decently
  2.) we got the option to hide NSFW communities from "All", while still keeping "show NSFW" on in our settings. Otherwise it's just really inconvenient to go to settings and flip that on and off every time you want to go to such a community or see a NSFW post that's not sexually explicit. They use the tag for other things too.
  
  we got the option to hide NSFW communities from “All”, while still keeping “show NSFW” on in our settings
  This seriously needs to be a thing asap
- Porn is porn, people will congregate or create what they are attracted to.
  That being said, this has a real potential to "poison the well" so to speak. People that jump from reddit to kbin only to be greeted with.... loli stuff, are going to quickly find themselves back on Reddit.
  Not only because of the moral problems with such content, but the communities that will attract, people will not want to be associated with.
- There are Lemmy instances that do this.
- hear hear. a blanket ban on porn is much more effective, there are other places you can find it.
  
  That, to be fair, is true for any type of content pretty much. Isn't the whole point of federating a bunch of websites together the ability to interact with anything from many different places under one account though?
  Like I very much get it if an instance in general is legally questionable, which is the original point, but most nsfw isn't

Irrelevant of the moral issues that this poses, such content is illegal in many countries (e.g the UK).
As I commented before on this specific issue earlier, I think that this argues that lemmy/kbin really need a more-descriptive mechanism for classifying content than just "NSFW" or "not-NSFW".
- Yeah I agree, tags like "gore/violence" and "sexually explicit" would be nice.
- I also agree with making a NSFL tag, but some things are NSFW without being straight up porn.

If you choose an instance that has nsfw disabled, you can’t see those communities on lemmynsfw anyway, even via the search functions.
Instances that do have nsfw enabled needs to be careful as if one of their users goes onto an other instances community with illegal nsfw stuff, it’s cached on their servers anyway just like your browser caches the images and videos from websites. I guess the cache can be deleted on a cron job but still something I would wanna stay away from if I was a Lemmy instance admin. Defederating would be what stops this.

One of the greatest joys of federation, is de-federation.

The way I see it I think defederation is warranted in this case since it is potentially incriminating niche content. People don't expect to find porn on YouTube, there's Pornhub and the likes for that, so why would I want to see porn sprinkled into my regular Lemmy front page? Just create a porn account on lemmynsfw.com.
Also having spent 16 years on Reddit I simply know that there is content that I absolutely don't want to see, for example, scat and all things rape fetish. I get that there are people into that, but I would feel more comfortable knowing that these instances are opt-in rather than opt-out by default. Especially, because blocking entire instances is tedious for users.
Oh, lastly: I have no idea what the age requirement is on here, but from a legal point: There may be children around here too, and serving (especially unsolicited) porn to children is a huge no-no in pretty much any jurisdiction.

@CosmicGiraffe
Codeberg issue link if people want to add thier experiences to it.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/118

I was already wanting this because my feed (all/new) is just overwhelmed with porn!
- I'm new so idk if this is the best solution but I just made 2 accounts that you can quickly switch between (at least in Jerboa) where NSFW is disabled in my main
  
  Ohh! That's an idea. I just don't like nsfw stuff. Never thought about turning it off lol

That was my second home after discovering my first planet.

I would also link this if you will: https://www.europol.europa.eu/crime-areas-and-statistics/crime-areas/child-sexual-exploitation
quote:
Child sexual exploitation refers to the sexual abuse of a person below the age of 18, as well as to the production of images of such abuse and the sharing of those images online.
This one: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/652718/IPOL_STU(2020)652718_EN.pdf
says the same applies to drawings and AI generated images.
That's up to the interpretation if individual country courts, but I would be wary nonetheless about pictures showing people that could look like teens.
Edit: downvote all you want, laws are laws, if you like to risk it, good for you, I don't.
- The other doc I linked is from the European Parliament and that one clearly says child porn (as defined by Europol doc) also applies to drawings and AI generated images.

I'm still trying to understand this whole app/situation, it makes zero sense to me lol. Is there not a way to block? This situation is definitely worth blocking because it's fucked up.
I'm more so just curious if it's sent to main feeds or being sought out? Just want to learn to avoid this in the future. I don't agree with the negativity of reddit to all downvote and ban at any chance they can but saying "I'd never do this but weirdos voted so we're a pedo sub now" is fucked
- Yes, you can block them yourself. Defederation means the server does the thinking and acting for you.
- You can sign up for lemmy or kbin at a number of different URLs and they all work together. But each site is run by different people. I see you're on kbin.social
  The kbin.social administrators can block entire other URLs, and all their content and users. This is called defederating. Since anyone can start a lemmy/kbin site some of them allow really hateful or gross things, and you can't do much else but block them.

I’ll Be blocking it now on my server.
Shame :(
- They clarified it; they thought loli porn just meant 18-25

Yes. A thousand times yes.

2023 and we still get animephobia?
- please say /s rn

Tbh, I feel like it actually should be defederated. I am not against porn, I literally made an account there like I have a separate account on reddit for porn, but I would love to not have all the porn stuff flooding the feed on my sfw account. Sadly there are no convenient filter options yet as it seems.
- You can enable "disable NSFW" in user settings
  
  I wish there was a way to separate NSFW a little more - I don’t mind NSFW stories and adult language and so forth when scrolling but if I’m in public I don’t want to scroll All and see porn. I have no problem with porn, but to me there’s a time and place.
  When I have NSFW disabled, I’m losing entire communities that I read the stories from because sometimes the content does 100% need the warning flag that it might not be for general audiences, but I don’t mind seeing an R rated movie in public while I won’t go see an NC-17 movie or an X rated movie in a theatre, personally, if that makes sense.
  
  Yeah but that's not quite what I want. On Synch for reddit I have the option to filter out porn nsfw - that's what I am looking for.
  
  I dug around and found that which is nice but I wish they put it more prominent in the UI. In the filter section would be great.
- That said, I would prefer if Lemmy had proper filter options. As long as something is within the law, I am okay with others to consume it, even if I don't want to consume it. It's like political opinions, religions etc. Stay within the law and you can do whatever you want - I don't always like it, but as long as I can filter it out I am fine with it existing.

162 comments