Edit - This is a post to the meta group of Blåhaj Lemmy. It is not intended for the entire lemmyverse. If you are not on Blåhaj Lemmy and plan on dropping in to offer your opinion on how we are doing things in a way you don’t agree with, your post will be removed.
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A user on our instance reported a post on lemmynsfw as CSAM. Upon seeing the post, I looked at the community it was part of, and immediately purged all traces of that community from our instance.
I approached the admins of lemmynsfw and they assured me that the models with content in the community were all verified as being over 18. The fact that the community is explicitly focused on making the models appear as if they’re not 18 was fine with them. The fact that both myself and one a member of this instance assumed it was CSAM, was fine with them. I was in fact told that I was body shaming.
I’m sorry for the lack of warning, but a community skirting the line trying to look like CSAM isn’t a line I’m willing to walk. I have defederated lemmynsfw and won’t be reinstating it whilst that community is active.
I don’t have an issue with the defederation call, and transparency regarding decisions around defederation is very healthy and good!
However, one of the more complicated implications of Lemmy’s federated structure is that defederation on instances is more of “everybody’s business” than it is on Mastodon, since Lemmy instances host communities and not just users. I don’t have much sympathy for free speech absolutists who feel the need to frame all defederation as “censorship” or some of form of tyranny, but since it is potentially splitting the user bases of communities on blahaj that folks on other instances have joined, it makes sense for folks on other instances to want their voices to be heard.
(Obviously, there are constructive and non-constructive ways to do that.)
This is also why the answer to everything won’t be “just run your own instance.” It’s important that more instances have well-developed and transparent moderation standards both internally and externally, and users will need to be savvy about the moderation landscape when they choose what instances to start communities on. (This will be a little less loaded of a question if/when Lemmy gets the ability to migrate communities.)
I think there’s a lot of “cross that bridge when we come to it” mindset amongst some of the bigger instance admins that is in the long run is much more detrimental than any one defederation call could be.
Believe it or not, I agree. It’s one of the reasons why I moderate less aggressively on lemmy than I do on the rest of the fediverse. I block/ban users here, for things I would defederate instances over on our main instance.
But images that look like CSAM are something else again. I’m not going to give leeway to spaces like that. I don’t want to be anywhere near NSFW content that can be mistaken for CSAM. I don’t want to moderate around it, I don’t want to navigate the legalities, and I don’t want to be connected to a community that attracts folk looking for porn like that.
That makes sense! I think you guys are well ahead of the curve in terms of this stuff compared to most instances, it’s appreciated