Edit: just to be clear, I’m only talking about lemmy.blahaj.zone here. If you’re coming from Kbin or some other instance, this won’t affect you.
I have nothing against porn in general, but LemmyNSFW is a firehose of NSFW content, some of it offensive or toxic, and the admins seem to be shaky on whether they’re prepared for the content. It’s started showing up in my /all/ feed now, and I’m worried.
Essentially the entirety of Lemmy’s porn is getting uploaded to one instance, and I am not at all confident in their ability to moderate it. The idea of a massive instance like that that’s still so young and untested and still trying to figure out whether they are going to allow underage content or not being allowed on my feed makes me really uncomfortable. I could just disable NSFW, but not all NSFW is porn and not all of it comes from that instance.
In addition to the lack of moderation, things I’ve seen that seem to be allowed include: misogyny, slurs for trans people, objectification, straight up rape…
They don’t even have any system of verification for anyone posting on there so they could be spreading CSEM or revenge porn into people’s caches unknowingly. There’s a potential legal risk here too.
Defederating seems more than reasonable. LemmyNSFW is just way too lax on their policies. If people here want to look at porn, they can always make an alt account over there.
Defederation is a horrible solution to that problem imo. It would mean no other user on this instance could see any of their content, just because you don’t like some of it. Worse, it cuts off all the users on that instance from all content on this instance. You’ll just create fragmentation and make things worse for everyone imo.
This problem only exists for you because you’re browsing All. The obvious solution is to just subscribe to the communities you’re interested in. There are plenty of good ways to discover communities and stay up to date on new ones without using All. All really means ALL content, that means there’s going to be stuff you don’t like, and that’s definitely not a good reason for defederation.
Long term I’m sure that a) as Lemmy grows, All will fill up with more mainstream stuff and you won’t see so much weird niche content, and b) there’ll be more advanced filtering/blocking tools so that you can do All but choose which instances to include/exclude
Saying “don’t browse /all/” isn’t really a good solution, and several communities I’m in I would never have discovered if not for /all/. Frankly, I haven’t had a problem with any instances other than LemmyNSFW as far as /all/ goes.
Defederation should be an option of last resort, not the first thing people reach for when they start seeing content or engagement they don’t like.
You can block content that you don’t want to see, along with hiding NSFW content so it doesn’t appear for you.
This isn’t a case of “waaah, I don’t like what they say”. These are bad-to-horrible things that explicitly go against our instance’s rules. Why should each individual here have to deal with this? Defederation is an important tool and is what makes the Fediverse better than a centralized platform.
The problem is that it is not tagged NSFW, despite its source being an NSFW server, so its thumbnails come through unblurred.
Legit question: As a non-BlahajZone and non-LemmyNSFW user, why do you care how our instance handles this?
Each Lemmy instance is its own community (in the dictionary sense, not as used by Lemmy), not unlike a bunch of different web forums. Running the same server software doesn’t mean each instance must or even should cache content from anywhere in the fediverse. If this community doesn’t want to have that sort of content available here, so what? Nothing stops anyone from creating accounts on multiple instances, and I expect there will soon be iOS and Android apps that make using them easier.
Federation reduces friction and encourages wider participation, but that’s not always what’s best for a community. And each instance has a list of instances it blocks, so all of us are free to look through the list to see if it’s anything we care about and go visit directly if we so choose.
(For the record: I haven’t looked at the content in question, but I’m happy to take Melmi’s word for it and am in favour of defederating.)
But browsing ALL is a good way of discovering new communities - the solution should not be “just don’t use the feature”
I noticed I have an option that says “Show NSFW posts” that I have enabled but it does not seem to do anything. Maybe the problem is there
Making sure the show nsfw option works properly when disabled as well as adding options to mark entire communities or instances nsfw both by the owners and by other instance admins should go a long way towards mitigating this imo. As well as several bugs where properly marked posts accidentally don’t get blurred because the blue gets applied to the community icon instead of the thumbnail, or the recommended posts box not blurring posts, those need to be fixed.
Beyond that, if limiting instances can be implemented so that no content gets shown except to those who specifically subscribed to communities from that instance, I feel like defederation may not be needed at that point unless the content is illegal or staying federated is resulting in excessive spam and trolling interactions (which afaik wouldn’t be blocked by limiting alone)
I agree, but the question is what to do now, when those features don’t exist yet.