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.
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.Without any evidence of wrong doing by LemmyNSFW, worrying about CSAM material and revenge porn from them is an imagined problem like transgender people raping people in bathrooms. As I pointed out, there is evidence of CSAM material. Using that as evidence to justify defederation is reasonable. What is is not reasonable is using fear of potential risks as a justification to defederate. I am not accusing you or anyone else of doing anything. I have been describing why defederating without evidence is undesirable. I am in fact saying that free speech is worth the risk of hate speech. And that peoples’ freedom to express themselves is worth the risk that they might do something wrong, like posting CSAM or revenge porn. If the LemmyNSFW moderators fail to curtail hate speech and wrong doing, then we, as an instance, have reasons to take action.
There are people who consider trans people and their content to be unethical. They have made discussing trans people illegal in schools, banned drag shows and discouraged pride parades through a climate of fear. To them there is no difference between a trans person’s content or someone on LemmyNSFW’s content. We should not divide ourselves without reason. And by defederating we are telling LemmyNSFW there is something they cannot do, regardless of how small a thing that is, that they cannot post or comment here without making another account.
Also pornography collectively is not an entity with a track record. The concern, about the abundance of porn on LemmyNSFW, reminds me of the MAP acronym slur directed at the trans community. Which tries to use the abundance of different kinds of people in the community as some kind of risk that pedophiles are accepted in the trans community, when they are not. If our moderates failed to stop CSAM material from being posted here, other instances would be justified in defederating from us. I’m sure there are people who think the trans community has a proven track record of CSAM material and would expect a high risk of it from us.
I am arguing against arguments. Specifically the arguments in this thread that seem eerily similar to other arguments that I dislike. I am sure that this similarity is not intentioned, but I am arguing against what I see in the thread. I am not sure how else I can argue in good faith. If I have misrepresented your argument, I apologize.
I think what is being argued is that the potential risk of harmful content from LemmyNSFW is not worth continuing to federate with them. I am arguing this is equivalent to society wanting to ostracize a group, like trans people, because the potential risk of harmful content is not worth the risk of continued association. Specifically, what I am saying is equivalent is the reasoning. Which argues that action against a group should be determined by the potential risk posed by that group and not by evidence of wrong doing by that group.