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.
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.)