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 haven’t seen any reports coming through for content from that instance, which makes it hard to choose to defederate, because I haven’t seen any examples of the problems you describe to get a sense of how the admins are responding.
Can I ask that for now, you aggressively report anything that crosses your feed? That will let me get a sense of how the admins from that instance are addressing the issue.
And hopefully, the ability for users to block whole instances isn’t too far away!
Part of what I’m concerned about is the lack of ability to know the age or consent of anyone on there due to the lack of verification. At least /r/gonewild could verify people somewhat, nothing is stopping people from posting CSEM on LemmyNSFW and we’d probably never know, at least until the FBI or other relevant agency got involved. It’s just spooky, especially when they have seemingly non-consenty stuff on their front page, at least when I went to check what their deal was.
I don’t think I’m willing to report anything because I’m not willing to turn off my NSFW filter again while we’re federated. If anything slips through without being tagged NSFW I’ll report it though. I haven’t been too good about reporting in the past.
They have at least one community named after a trans slur which is not great. Unfortunately I was on mlem when I saw it so I couldn’t report it.
Will do!
Although I have seen some trans slurs and “rape” content from there, it’s mostly just been fetish stuff and nothing real or genuinely harmful. Also, you can already hide nsfw content in the settings, although lemmynsfw has had an issue with actually getting people to tag it as such.
CW: Slurs and racism
I’m not sure how to report something from the modlog but…
CW: Slurs and racism
…one of the moderators of that particular instance deleted content from their TGirls community for the reason “Post Asian content in !ladyboys”. The link in the modlog goes to https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/261565 .
I’ve removed that group
I agree, it’s definitely made me raise an eyebrow. I don’t mind nsfw content but something about the domain and content coming from it leaves me with a sense of dread. I’ll be hyper vigilant about reporting for sure.
Same. I enjoy NSFW content, but I don’t need it available everywhere I go, and I certainly don’t want it unfiltered and poorly moderated.
I like being able to choose when and if I consume NSFW content. When I’m at work is not exactly ideal…
For now, deselect “show nsfw” in your user settings
Yeah, like I said in my post it sucks as a solution because the NSFW tag is used on other instances too for other reasons, but it’ll have to do for the time being.
Does Lemmy/kbin use nsfw for spoilers like reddit does?
Some people do, which is unfortunate. Technically Reddit has a separate spoiler mode now though.
At least on jerboa it’s blurred but it’s very clear what you’re looking at. I’d rather have a red box or something.
Yeah for instance bottom surgery discussions usually get tagged NSFW in a lot of places because that’s inherent to the subject matter.
this doesn’t work effectively, too many lemmynsfw posts aren’t tagging as nsfw, and wind up in the all feed.
There are some things that are NSFW that aren’t CP that people may be interested in. I’m not into porn myself but there is some art or language that is considered NSFW, videos of say 911 are NSFW but people shouldn’t have to be totally cut off from what’s happening in the world because an image or video may be NSFW. Maybe we can have a PORN label, and a separate label for porn that might be illegal and immoral, and one for non sex related NSFW that can be filtered somehow?
I don’t want to see CP. I have no problem filtering out sex related communities but people shouldn’t have to look at CP to not see it and not have to block all NSFW content. Its fine to block it all for now, sure, but what’s the plan?
Also, there should be a way to tag an entire sublemmy or server as NSFW without having ti ban or defederate it.
There is, it just confusingly isn’t always inherited by the posts themselves. Plus, like people said NSFW =/= porn.
The real solution here would be being able to block instances as a user, which it sounds like Kbin might have as a feature? I’m probably gonna switch over to Kbin once the Blåhaj one is up.
I agree, there should be a tag for excluding porn from /all
Illegal content should be removed by moderators such as it was on reddit, it’s just that lemmy is growing too fast atm
It does not work for me. I still get NSFW posts - although blurred out.
Working for me…
Same. “hide adult” does nothing
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.
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.)
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.
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…
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.
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.
As Lemmy matures, I bet we’ll get a lot more granular controls of nsfw content that shows up in your feeds. In my case, I’d like these controls:
- hot/top/new feeds: only want to see nsfw from my instance, maybe a couple of others. Ideally there’d be tag separation between porn and general nsfw, but having too granular of tags can quickly get out of hand.
- viewing community pages: I’d want to see everything posted, nsfw or not, if I navigate to a community itself.
I’ve just been blocking the communities I don’t want to see as they pop up on the main feed, which has been working alright.
This is Lemmy NSFW’s post about their rules for underage content. It seems clearly defined to me. Their mods have access to all the same tools that every other Lemmy instance has. https://lemmynsfw.com/post/29826
misogyny, slurs for trans people, objectification, straight up rape…
I saw lots of porn. Most people seemed respectful in the comments. I didn’t come across any misogyny. Porn involves peoples’ bodies. It hard to talk about that kind of topic in a way that doesn’t end up being objectifying at least a little. These seem like criticisms against porn in general.
I searched through the comments to find examples of these trans slurs. https://genderkit.org.uk/slurs/
I found one instance of removed and one instance of hermaphrodite. Slurs for trans people do not seem to be a prevalent part of the instance at all.
As far as rape, there is definitely a Rape Hentai sub. Unfortunately it does seem there are some images that violates both the instance’s and the community’s rules on underage characters. Hopefully these will reported and taken down by the moderators. If not, then that could be reasonable grounds for defederating.
Rape porn is obviously a grey area. I’m not interested in kink shaming people. Adults acting out scenarios and pretending isn’t a problem. But CSAM material is a problem. I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but it seems like those drawings violate federal law.
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.
Friendly reminder that trans SWers often use slurs when posting their content as those terms are what cis men use to search for it.
Turn off nsfw in your account options
I’d be in favor. They don’t bother to check their content as NSFW, and, to my knowledge there’s nothing that currently exists for an entire instance to have its content blanketly tagged in that manner.
I report, and I’m individually blocking communities on NSFW servers. But that won’t prevent their next magazine from causing the same issue.
Removed by mod
Unfortunately you cannot block an entire instance as a user.
This is a requested feature that I am sure the devs will address eventually. Although based on their recent feedback they are focusing on stability and optimization to handle the spike in people at the moment. What I personally have done is set my feed to “subscribed” only. This allows you much more control of which communities you see. However I do see how individually blocking instances would be nice in the future.
Speaking of which the IOS app in TestFlight called Memmy is going to add this feature to their app in the next update.
On Mastodon there are levels of moderation for other instances and admins can set certain instances in such a way, that posts from that domain only appear to users who subscribe to said domain. On Kbin the user can block entire domain. I’m not suggesting you should ditch lemmy (it has post filtering based on post language which I miss on Kbin), but rather - maybe some sort of similar functionality should be proposed as feature request on lemmy repo. Unfortunately, that won’t resolve the problem fast. Moderating tools are still a bit lacking, as often mentioned on the topic of beehaw defederating from many instances.
How do you block a community?
I think this could be a next thing to look into for the developers - blocking an instance on a user level. So rather than an instance defederating from an instance, the instance mods could post a “suggested for blocking” instances. What do you think?
Maybe they are confused by blocking a “magazine?” I can’t find any way to block an instance (which I would think is a community).
If you want to block entire domain in kbin, that’s possible, but I don’t know easy way to navigate to the domain page. If you enter the adress manually you can do it. So for example if you wanted to block lemmynsfw.com, you would navigate to page https://kbin.social/d/lemmynsfw.com and block it with the button in the sidebar of the domain page. Be warned though - if you visit this page you might see the content you wanted to block, so treat this link as NSFW. Also, from what I’ve seen - microblog posts from blocked domain may still appear, but if you don’t use microblog view this should be enough to avoid seeing posts from blocked domain
Can you go to kbin.social/d/lemmynsfw.com and block it from there? When I do that it shows up in my blocked domains
communities in lemmy are magazines on kbin. On the sidebar (default to the right) you can find magazine info and buttons to subscribe to it or block it. The original post came from lemmy, so there might be confusion as to the naming of the things.
If you wanted to block entire domain in kbin, that’s possible too, but I don’t know easy way to navigate to the domain page. If you enter the adress manually you can do it. So for example if you wanted to block lemmynsfw.com, you would navigate to page https://kbin.social/d/lemmynsfw.com and block it with the button in the sidebar. Be warned though - if you visit the page you might see the content you wanted to block, so it’s probably NSFW. Also, from what I’ve seen - microblog posts from blocked domain still may appear, but if you don’t use microblog view this should be enough
You can just block the domain. See screenshot
