Hello everyone! It’s been four days since this instance was born and I feel like we have something special and with a lot of potential. But it’s up to us to build the community that we want and I expect that we’ll be put to the test if everything returns back to normal (or mostly normal) over at reddit.
Still, Mastodon is a good example that furry communities can thrive on federated network even if their main corporate counterpart (twitter) is still alive. Thus, we have all the reason to believe that we can build something meaningful if we persist in creating a welcoming, friendly, open and content-rich instance.
Goals for the future
After realizing how enriching it was to share this instance with like-minded people, I believe we would do ourselves a disservice if we didn’t explore more of the SFW / community-building side of things.
I don’t want to overlap too much with pawb.social who are doing an awesome job themselves, but since we only allow members over 18 and specialize in sharing artwork, I believe there’s a very interesting niche to be found in becoming a community where mature conversations can be held as well as having an awesome collection of the best furry artwork and memes..
I believe it makes a lot of sense for Yiffit.net to position itself as the lemmy instance where you can hold conversations about sensitive topics regarding relationships, sexuality, life as an adult, evolution of the furry fandom over time, and many more mature subjects (as well as casual banter of course!). On the art side of things, we’ll want to be THE place on the fediverse to discover amazing art of all types and funny memes.
In this sense Yiffit could be similar to one of those traditional adult magazines with sexy pin-ups on one page and a serious, yet also insightful and empowering report about trans rights on the other (not sure if you’ve ever come across one of those magazines).
Present Challenges
Currently my biggest concern is defederation. We are a smaller instance (although growing!) and not yet fully established. This means that we run a bigger risk of being blocked by large instances who don’t understand or care for nsfw artwork.
Fortunately it seems that most instances really don’t care about it as long as we don’t start sharing content of underage characters or content which is extreme.
It is for that reason that I want to ask you to please be extra careful with both the images you post and their titles. For the following months as we become more and more established we want to make absolutely sure that anything that is posted could not look like an underage character to a non-furry remote instance admin who might be seeing yiff for the first time in their lives.
Images depicting teacher/student or posts including words like “daddy” or “mommy” are not banned and I really hate to be in this position, but from both the content and the title it must be clear to any casual observer that it is not an underage character. Likewise, extreme content involving blood, gore, cheesegraters or similar should be avoided until the instance is more established.
I’m the last person who wants put restrictions to the creativity and freedom of our users, but right now the fediverse is a bit like the wild west where it’s “shoot first and ask later”. We want to have a solid foundation and let other instances get to know us better before we venture into those areas.
I hope you can understand :(
Clarification on some rules
Finally, I wanted to clarify one rule and give a heads up to a new rule for the /c/yiff community.
- Regarding linking back to the artist’s gallery or profile Please keep in mind that we need to do our part in giving attribution to the artists without whom this whole instance would not exists.
When you link back, please don’t link to an e621 post. We want to give the artists direct traffic by linking to their profile, gallery or post on FA/Twitter/DeviantArt etc…
Fortunately e621 does have source links (which is what I have been using). So, instead of copy pasting the url from the browser this can simply be fixed by copy pasting the url to the artist’s gallery or post which is listed in the left column (at the bottom) of e621.
- Regarding communities like /c/yiff and others which are not gender-specific and which are moderated by me, it would be a good idea to start adding the gender pairing in the title.
For example: [M/M], [M/F], etc… Once this change goes live it’ll be explained in detail in the sidebar so don’t worry!
This rule will not be applicable to any community that is not moderated by me. I want to give you all the freedom you want in how you run your communities, so it’s up to you.
And I think that’s it for now. Please let me know in the comments what you think about these changes. It would mean a lot and I depend on your feedback to be able to steer things towards the right direction.
I think it’s a good idea to have some general communities (sublemmies?) that are adult’s only. I think it’ll be a good way to minimize younger folks posting like how r/furry and r/furry_irl were. I think this can be good, because there’s less of a need to self-censor under the premise that a minor might see something they shouldn’t, even beyond porn.
The place looks good so far. Good job.
I completely agree with everything you’ve outlined. The rule clarifications seem reasonable, and especially the concern for defederation is well-founded.
It seems like you have a good grasp on what will be needed to grow the community. Keep doing what you’re doing!
The changes are absolutely fine and they make plenty of sense.
We need to keep ourselves classy, like playboy. Where you read it for the articles more so than for the pinups. (･ω<)☆ (･ω<)☆
Though hopefully we don’t end up like an old copy with the pages stuck together. (≖ ͜ʖ≖)
I think the changes look good. Yiffit and Lemmy in general are very new to everyone, so it’s in the prime position to be made what we want it to be.
If we keep the content under control (no underage as you’ve stated) we likely run a much lower risk of being blocked by other instances. That and proper titles should help too.
Sexuality is a big part of life (and furry in general from my experience), so this also being a place where one can express that, be it through art or text, should be encouraged. Of course it doesn’t have to be limited to just that type of conversation.
Even if Reddit does go back on their plans, I and possibly others don’t intend to go back.
Thank you for your feedback <3 Yeah, even if reddit goes back on their plans or whatever, we can make this space better and more community oriented than reddit currently is and will ever be.
Yeah this place is much more pleasant, why would I go back? Oh and fuck spez and all that lmao
Congrats on getting a community going, by the way. When I first saw Yiffit a few days ago when Lemmy was starting to get going I was worried it’d go the way of many “sublemmys” that have a few posts from the moderator and nothing else. Pleasantly surprised to see that it seems to be growing and self sustaining.
Guess nothing brings people together more than furry smut. :P
Having non-porn mature discussions sounds like a great idea. If only so people can claim that they are only browsing Yiffit “for the articles”. :P
Honestly, I’d rather not see blood/gore at all on the instance, or at least have it C/W (which Lemmy doesn’t support yet). No shade to those that enjoy it, but IMO I’d rather that the “main” communities forbid it, and it be posted to dedicated communities that people can block.
The main communities will always be pretty tame. Extreme content should be posted to their communities, although as I said, I’ll have a temporary soft ban on content that’s really extreme until Lemmy has better ways for remote instances to remove our content without blocking us or until we’re better established. Something like gore, would fall into the category.
This all seems reasonable and we’ll thought out to me. Thanks for all the work you’re putting into this place, I feel at home here already :3
I’ve edited my posts where possible to align with the new rules.
The source on e621 is not always provided. I think it’s worth mentioning bookmarking (or installing browser extension) for https://saucenao.com or https://fluffle.xyz and look for source that way if it’s found on e621 and no source was provided. I think I saw them linked somewhere, maybe in meta, but doesn’t hurt to post them again
Woah, thanks! I saved this is reply. I’m sure it’ll come in handy.
hi wander! i think you make some awesome points here. i’m even thinking that maybe, for the sake of being blocked or avoided by others, maybe we should change the instance name? i know that’s a big deal because its changing a whole domain and configuration and such but it’s definitely been in the back of my mind as something that may deter others from interacting with us or joining.
i think you’re right on all fronts, though, and we should really stray away from posting anything fringe to help more people hop on board, at least in the beginning. ty 💙
I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. After all, there’s nothing wrong with Yiff and I believe that most instances also understand this. From my limited experience of being a Mastodon admin for half a year, what most instances are concerned is about the nature of the content that is posted, not necessarily whether it’s NSFW or not. Sometimes admins can be a bit hypervigilant, but in general they want to avoid unmoderated instances, instances that spread racism, hate speech or problematic material.
We should be fine with our name as long as we make it clear that our instance is well moderated and that we don’t share problematic content. Once we are more established we should be fine with also sharing content that’s more niche and perfectly legal, but which could make other instance admins raise an eyebrow. We need them to get us to know better first.
ah, okay 💙 i definitely trust your expertise here because i’m just now getting into mastodon and i only have experience modding things like furry telegram groups xD i’m glad our name and our content won’t immediately be frowned upon.
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