Hey yall! It’s gavi here! It’s been quite a whirlwind over these past few weeks. Yesterday our lovely @yay made a post in regard to wanting to take a step away from lemmynsfw, and there was a lot of confusion from that post so I’m here now to talk about some of things that have occurred behind the scenes.
Who is hosting now?
Right now, our team is expanding and changing. @yay will still be doing primary hosting, but we now have more back-end admins and a more carefully coordinated backend team spread across time zones. We are discussing migrating the server, as well as other things. When any changes are expected to occur, an announcement will be made. This will not a profit-based project, so bear with us here.
What about the content policy? Is scat banned, whats the deal?
Right now, as lemmy expands, we will be having a temporary pause on specific niche content that may potentially risk our instance being defederated. This is not permanent, and we have no personal qualms with such content, but we need to make this choice until mod tools improve and make sure that we aren’t flooding /all with stuff that might cause issues for other instances.
The following content has a temporary pause and we will review such as lemmy evolves and improves. The removal of these communities are not permanent.
Hot lunch, blood, scat
The following content however will not be welcome on our instance, no matter if mod tools improve.
noncon, depictions of underage content drawn or otherwise (Loli/Shota/Cub/Etc), deepfakes & revenge porn (elaboration will be expanded in upcoming content policy updates.), snuff, beastiality
Furry content is not banned and furries are welcome here provided they follow the content policy as outlined above. That said, if you are posting furry content, consider posting it on a specifically furry instance as they more equipped to moderate that content than we are at this time.
Generally, we are discussing improving our content policy, and will provide a thread elaborating further upon existing policies and allowing discussion and feedback in a separate thread in the near future. Keep a look out.
Current staff situation
I have been made the lead admin for the site. We are trying to figure out a feasible situation for staffing to prevent burn out and evenly distribute content administration across time zones. We will likely be having staff apps in the future, so if that is something you would be interested in keep an eye out for that. Right now, our biggest thing is working with the limited mod tools we have. It’s really a matter of trial and error and having a more carefully coordinate staff leadership is something that would be beneficial for the site at large.
Federated And Defederated Instances
As some have already seen, some instances have defederated from us. That is fully their right to if they want to disengage from NSFW content entirely. However, if the defederation was due to a concern or issue outside of that within our instance, we would like to discuss the matter and at least make a fair attempt to address their concerns. Our desire moving forward is to establish communication with instance admins to address concerns that may be popping up, as well as just generally creating an open line of communication and encouraging feedback from them and their community at large. There will likely be a public matrix community created for the site as well that will foster technical discussions of the site only, such as sharing downtime, development, etc. I will personally be attempting to reach out to larger instance admins. With that being said, if there is any instance admin that see this and would be interested in reaching out please do not hesitate to. My matrix address is within my profile.
We are currently discussing defederating instances that may put some of our communities at risk or violate our own content policies, and if that occurs that will be announced promptly.
NSFW Tagging
Right now, we are investigating some way to completely designate the entire instance with nsfw tags by default and ways to more properly blur community icons, but there are hurdles and limits to the current nsfw tagging system within lemmy. With that being said, admins and mods cannot tag nsfw content that isn’t properly tagged, and some lemmy apps are particularly finnicky with nsfw tags. It’s a pain in the ass, but we REALLY need to be making sure our content properly tagged so that it doesn’t pop up in federated instances as untagged nsfw content. There will likely be a crackdown on said posts that are not tagged properly, so please be aware of this fact and triple check that your posts are properly tagged. I am sorry for the impending hardass attitude from myself on the matter, but this is really critical to maintaining good will with other instances that decide to federate NSFW content.
I feel like there should be kind of feature to mark at an instance level. Like since this is a nsfw instance we should add a way to have it so all posts in communities of this instance are marked nsfw by default
Your lips to God’s ear, my friend.
I have proposed something of this nature to the Lemmy developers and am waiting on feedback from them.
The following content however will not be welcome on our instance, no matter if mod tools improve.
noncon, depictions of underage content drawn or otherwise (Loli/Shota/Cub/Etc), deepfakes & revenge porn (elaboration will be expanded in upcoming content policy updates.), snuff, beastiality
Good call.
One of my biggest grievances with Mastodon is that the discoverability of posts outside of your local instance is complete ass. If I search by All, my feed ends up dominated with hentai reposting bots that regurgitate content from various subreddits and imageboards. Some of these posts have ‘loli’ hashtags, which is not only morally repugnant but also outright illegal and punished with the same level of severity as CSAM in some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
This is one of several reasons why I stopped using Mastodon after a few days.
If we want Lemmy to become an alternative to Reddit, we need to put a moratorium on evil lest the platform ends up as another Voat, Poal, Gab, Parler, etc. That includes purging underage content.
Thanks for all your effort! I agree with most of the thinks you wrote and it totally makes sense to temporary remove some coms till mod tools improves and Lemmy evolves. My only criticism is that there is no differentiation between IRL Beastiality and Hentai Beast Stuff in the new content policy. I think it should be treated differently. I can certainly understand a temporary ban, but a permanent one seems a bit much. It was always allowed on Reddit for a reason. I think it would be great if we could rethink this. Keep up your great work guys!
As a general policy we have decided that we are going to treat irl depictions of forbidden content and drawn depictions of forbidden content in the same way. We acknowledge that there are many excellent arguments for why this should not be the case, and to be frank it was a close call, but that’s the way the policy shook out.
As moderation tools improve, and the community evolves, this policy may be revisited. I wouldn’t expect that to happen anytime soon, though.
Unfortunately, this is a bottom line for me, and I won’t be staying at LemmyNSFW (departure post).
Thanks for running this instance until now, and I wish you and your team the best.
Is there a fix being worked on with the mod teams being “shuffled” since my own communities admin is now a bot, and we (the bot owner and I) can’t transfer ownership back to me
I have been made the lead admin for the site. We are trying to figure out a feasible situation for staffing to prevent burn out and evenly distribute content administration across time zones.
I’m so grateful for what you guys do, and I’m glad you guys are planning things to avoid burn out. I work as a developer, and know from experience that management that relies on “heroes” sucks. No heroes!
Right now, as lemmy expands, we will be having a temporary pause on specific niche content that may potentially risk our instance being defederated. This is not permanent, and we have no personal qualms with such content, but we need to make this choice until mod tools improve and make sure that we aren’t flooding /all with stuff that might cause issues for other instances.
Even though I was “defending” scat here, I think this is a sensible stance. Lemmy is in its early adopter stage and there are going to be growing pains.
