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One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of
its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka
CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly
and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age. The admin then
demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that
the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We
vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they
decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we
will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of
fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet. If someone
made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that
would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends – not
roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive – to be a child and makes porn,
that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that. One of the reasons we run our
instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don’t body
shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That
means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young,
cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some
people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.
There’s no way to draw a line that says “you can’t like adult people that look
like X” without crossing a line that we will not cross.
I’m thinking that they may have either made a mistake in picking another community, or that they saw what they thought was content from that community and called it out immediately. Let’s not forget that if anything Lemmy is less immune to the moderator god complex than Reddit. Since most “mods” of Lemmy/fediverse instances are also paying a physical price they feel even more attacked. Rather than just announcing simply “Blahaj has defederated from Lemmynsfw” they made a whole post about it and then talked at length about culture war stuff. A simple “Blahaj states their reason for defederating is due to our hosting of potentially illegal content. We want to remind our subscribers and user that lemmynsfw does NOT support illegal content, will NOT host it and will remove anything that violates the law.” They chose to take it as an insult. It’s just business.
Alas, Lemmy does not provide a way of making a local only post, or that is how it would have been done.