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.
The slurs I was referring to were “ladyboy” and “trap”, both of which I tend to think of as slurs but seem to be more or less accepted in the porn space.
There was a community called /c/womenarethings on the front page when I went there, with a caption about a woman being raped by multiple men with a picture of a real life woman (not hentai) looking scared. Sure, people can be into that and it doesn’t inherently make them bad people. I’m not trying to kinkshame, but I don’t think that we need to federate with it. Especially when there’s no verification that that woman or any other is not actually in distress.
I think people should assume their own liability for going into porn spaces, and I don’t think that the federation benefits from unverified porn being mirrored through it. It’s not that I’m concerned that they will knowingly allow CSEM through, but rather that when they allow IRL porn without verifying the age or consent of the people in the images that those people could very well be underage or could have not consented to being uploaded. That’s a risk you take when looking at porn, but it’s especially not one I want to take when I’m not even trying to look at porn, it’s just injecting itself into my feed.
It’s easy to eliminate revenge porn from a non-porn community: delete all the porn, and ta da, no revenge porn. It’s much harder to eliminate all the revenge porn from a porn community, because how do you tell the difference? Especially when kink stuff is allowed, how are you supposed to tell the difference between consentual non-consent and non-consentual non-consent?
People always joked about making porn alts on Reddit, why don’t people just do that? Why is federation a big deal?
I think some of these concerns about verifying the age of participates and the source of the images are valid. I don’t want photos from a person’s actual rape, or photos obtained or uploaded without consent, to be circulated on the web. Nor do I want CSAM, which is illegal, or CSEM material being distributed.
I can only speak for myself, but I think concerns about Federation are less important than cutting ourselves off from instances because of fears of obscene material that might not appeal to someone. Discussion and books about LGBTQ+ people, drag performances, pride parades are all being targeted across the US because their existence violates conservatives views. My existence is obscene to some people. I would rather not bring that same treatment against others if they aren’t doing anything harmful.
I feel like this is a false equivalence, and a harmful one at that. I’m not targeting anyone. People who like porn can make porn, and people who like porn can look at porn. An instance with a couple thousand members defederating from another is in no way comparable to the continued war on LGBTQ+ people going on in the US in the moment, in no small part because Defederation simply prevents interactions on this instance. It has absolutely zero effect on interactions outside of this instance, and there is literally nothing stopping anyone from taking 30 seconds to register for an account on LemmyNSFW and browse there. Hell, you don’t even need an account, because they patched the webui to display NSFW posts by default. It’s not like they’re posting porn on this instance anyway.
Like I said in my OP, it’s a firehose of content. Porn is difficult to moderate. LemmyNSFW exists because they’re the only ones who are willing to take on the moderation burden and the liability of hosting porn, and they’ve absorbed the burden for essentially the entire threadiverse, save a couple instances. Maybe nothing happens, but maybe it’s a bunch of kindling all in one spot. I just want to stay as far away as possible.
The magnitude of the actions are not the same. The mindset, the reasoning, and the implications are worryingly similar to me. By defederating we are telling an entire community we do not want to see them or their content. And we do not want them to be able to interact with us or our content. Defederating immediately feels like a knee jerk reaction to a community that enjoys something other people view as obscene.
Again, if their mods fail to moderate the content properly, which it already seems to be the case, then we have a justifiable reason to defederate. However defederating because they might fail to moderate the content feels a lot like a bathroom bill. The kind that says a trans person might abuse the ability to go in the bathroom of their choice, possible even rape someone, so they should be barred from their preferred bathroom. Of course defederating won’t stop people on LemmyNSFW from using their instance, but it feels like the same guilty until proven innocent, risk mitigation logic that gets directed at trans people. It feels exclusionary, the same way a sports division says they don’t want trans people, but those trans people can still play on teams in another division for their assigned gender at birth. Taking on trans people is perceived as not worth the risk to fairness for the other players in that division.
Everyone might end up making lots of accounts for different lemmy instances. It’s not a huge hassle, and it might become a chosen convention to mitigate risks between instances. I think if we, as lemmy communities in general, are going to go that route we should do it because we have evidence to support that moderates cannot do their jobs otherwise. I imagine this will become self evident very quickly.
Are you saying that porn is equal to trans people, in this analogy?
I understand saying it’s too soon to jump to conclusions about LemmyNSFW. I disagree, but I understand. The admins here seem to be going with your approach rather than mine, which is their prerogative. More power to them.
Your analogy, though, I think is absurd. I don’t understand how you can equate making people, at worst, have to make multiple accounts, with targeted hate and harassment based on identity, that threatens people’s lives and their ability to survive in public.
I have not once said anything against anyone who enjoys porn or makes porn. Sex work is real work. If there were a well-moderated instance to post porn that had a system for verification, I wouldn’t be asking about defederation. This has nothing to do with hate, or my distaste for anyone’s identity. I resent the implication.
I am saying the people with accounts in the LemmyNSFW instance are equal to trans people. Their enjoyment of porn is a characteristic, which some people might find objectionable. This characteristic in theory presents potential risk, but is not inherently a problem.
First they came for the porn enjoyers, and I did not speak out-because I was not a porn enjoyer. XD Couldn’t help myself, sorry. But seriously, I would appreciate our mods acting based on evidence when they make a decision that impacts people like this. It’s not about what we would be making them do, making multiple accounts, but why we are doing it, not giving them the benefit of the doubt.
No, I don’t believe you or anyone else raising concerns is acting from a place of hate. Sorry if it came off that way. It feels more like a place of fear. Well-meaning people can be divided by their fears. Which the actual hateful people use to divide and conquer us. Applying this reasoning to people who like porn might be coming out of left field, but I think that’s the reason division can happen so easily, the other group always seems to be coming out of left field.
I’m glad people are bringing LemmyNSFW up for discussion, because it does seem like the instance’s ability to moderate content deserves scrutiny.
Except the people enjoying or even posting the porn are not the problem, the porn itself is and it’s moderation. It has nothing to do with the people. I have 0 problem talking to or interacting with people from LemmyNSFW as long as they aren’t creeps. My concern with federation started with not wanting the porn itself on my feed, and extends to a concern about caching it here on this server. I don’t mind having people who enjoy porn on my feed, and in fact I imagine a decent proportion if not majority of the people on my feed enjoy porn and that’s great, I just don’t want the porn itself on my feed.
Defederating is definitely an extreme solution in this case, but options are limited at this early stage in Lemmy’s development. The ideal solution, I think, would be to silence the instance Mastodon-style so stuff won’t show up to anyone who doesn’t specifically subscribe to those communities, and then possibly disable caching.
In the mean time, until the ability for users to block instances is added, I’ve disabled NSFW on my end. I miss out on some stuff that I’d want to see, but for the most part it’s fine. Some stuff still bleeds through unflagged as NSFW though.
Porn doesn’t post itself. We shouldn’t separate the content from the poster, because the content is the poster’s speech. It would be no different than another instance saying, “we don’t like selfies of people mid transition or skirt spinny memes and we will defederate from any instance that posts that content”. Or in other words, it’s fine for these people to exist as long as they are silent and don’t express themselves the way they want to. Their speech might be viewed as obscene and/or offend someone. People come onto a social media app to speak. When we defederate from an instance we are taking action against people, not just their content.
I feel like you have to be arguing in bad faith at this point. You’re still on this whole thing about “obscenity” and me trying to silence people or trying to get rid of the stuff they like. They can literally do whatever they want as long as they aren’t hurting people.
I’m literally just concerned about how easy it is for non-consentual pornography to slip through the moderation team. I’m not making up this issue. Most prominently, Pornhub, the #1 porn host as far as I’m aware, got in a swamp of legal trouble and ended up banning non-verified content because it was infested with CSAM and revenge porn, and they aren’t the only ones. This isn’t an imagined problem like transgender people raping people in bathrooms, unless you’re suggesting that that’s also a risk that we take but that we should allow it because expression is good.
If skirt spinning memes had a risk of having non-consentual
pornographymemes in them, I would be very cautious around those communities and maybe not want them on my feed even if the memes were usually great. But that’s not the case, unlike for pornography which has a proven track record of having illegal and unethical content mixed in with the good that is difficult to separate unless you implement verification–which LemmyNSFW is not doing. Again, nothing against the people posting the porn, and frankly nothing against the porn itself. I’m not some anti-porn crusader, I like porn from time to time too. It’s only the 1% of people who are the issue, the people who post literal child pornography and other non-consentual content. People can assume that risk, that’s their prerogative, but I just think that we should prevent that risk from spreading onto other servers where the images will potentially be downloaded and cached on the server itself.Friendly reminder that trans SWers often use slurs when posting their content as those terms are what cis men use to search for it.