Hot take: it’s better to have a dedicated hentai instance hosted by someone else.

Here’s my issue. Where I am characters who are canonically under age depicted in a sexual manner, regardless of appearance, are considered child porn. If we get rid of rule two I will be deleting my account here immediately and seeking out naked fun times somewhere else where I don’t have to worry about my presence on a server hosting what my jurisdiction considers child porn being considered damning.

Edit: accidentally said rule three instead of rule two

It’s clear that this is a difficult issue. I think a lot of the controversy here is coming form the wording of the rules.

I think these rules set better standards while being much clearer and simpler to act upon:

1. No sexual depictions of people (real or fictional) under the age of 18. Period.
2. All sexual depictions of fictional characters must unambiguously appear as 18+.

• Ambiguous depictions include but are not limited to:
  • “3,000 year old frozen in perpetual youth” type fictional characters
  • “Aged up, but not really” depictions of fictional characters who are below the age of 18 in their source material
• The basis for ambiguous content will be behavior and physical appearance. Admin/mod’s decision is final.

These rules make it very clear that depictions of people, real or fictional, below the age of 18 is explicitly banned. They also give admins/mods a little more discretion on ambiguous content. Eg, “aged up” fictional characters that are very clearly depicted as adults (eg, 65 year old Lisa Simpson) can be allowed with these rules.

I know this is over but let me add something:
If it’s not illegal for the region your server is located, then there’s no technical or legal problem; otherwise don’t ask the community, just do what makes you feel comfortable, if another instance was created where some kind of content is problematic, then it’s up to them to move it or defederate, not your problem.
People are never going to be happy, they will always find some reason to whine and cry when it comes to porn/hentai, their main reason being “legality” and “morality” but will browse piracy instances because that’s completely legal, no gray area at all.

It’s your instance and limiting it to what you think it’s right it’s enough, other instances with issues will defederate anyway because they want to be able to browse in public or with kids around them without the NSFW filter activated (because that makes fucking sense) so they don’t miss all the gore, violence and graphic news the federation has to offer (because that’s totally acceptable).
I’m all for making the communities as specific as possible so everyone can filter them out on their own, as the capable adults they are supposed to be (if they are not adults… well I’m sorry their parents don’t care about them and allow them to do whatever).

All that said, the idea is not allowing content that seems underage, I think that’s good enough and covers the “3000 y/o loli” type of content because if you try to please all the “good christian kids” who try to insult you into doing their bidding, you’ll never be over with it and might as well close the whole instance; people just love throwing the “pedophile” insult at the first opportunity because they know it worries others of being labeled something they are not.

Make the rules as you see fitting, the community mods should be able to comply with them, make their own and enforce them; whatever the users want usually comes last because 90% of the time the user doesn’t know what they want, they just know they want it, even if it goes against what one could expect in a NSFW place.
Don’t be afraid of being defederated, right now it’s a hot topic because Beehaw users learned they can and now everyone and their mother wants to defederate; just let them, when they isolate themselves they will be happy and so will be the rest of the federation.

Keep the rule.

If there’s anything ambiguous, just remember that it’s better to remove stuff that’s not pedos content than leave stuff up that is.

I’m pretty knowledgeable about gay stuff, specifically gay art and gay characters prominent in gay art if that is something you need in of when it comes to admin-wise.

Honestly, I’d keep canonical age out of it. For example, I don’t know who the person in photo #2 is, but looks old enough to me. If it turns out that it’s an “aged up version” of someone that’s canonically 12… So what? In the picture they’re not 12, and that’s what counts.

So in my opinion 1, 3 and 5 look too young, while 2 and 4 are fine imho.

have a vote

results are sitting at 75%/25% for remove/keep

keep the rule anyway because bullied by the minority

lmao

Keep the rule. Even though it may be silly at times, it will keep us from being defederated by some of the more prudish instances.

Personally i think the rule should be removed, as long as the other rule regarding all characters appearing over 18 stays in place. Its very difficult to find the canonical age for all characters people post to hentai subs, and if the instance gains traction that will only get harder. Also the cononical age rule in my opinion brings up more problems than it solves due to “3000 year old dragon loli’s” which in my opinion are obviously loli bait and should be banned, but would technically be over the canonical age line.

<Trigger warning :CP> in the end i always think about why CP is illegal. and thats that it prays on someone who cannot consent or defend themselves. CP Hentai while it doesnt have the same victim is illegal because its believed that it encourages/radicalizes people to engage in IRL CP (certain cultures like japan seem to have been affected by this, studies shown that theres definitely at least a strong correlation if not causation).

so i look at hentai similar to cosplays, if the person cosplaying a character is 30, i see it as that character at 30. If at 14 year old were cosplaying a 30 year old, thinking about them sexually would be predatory and trash.

One of the other issues, is there are fetishes that are less controversial (Itty Bitty Titty Comitty) that depending on how you define sexual characteristics are actually riskier legally/ethically than an age adjusted character (let alone more controversial fetishes like ABDL,Size Differences, etc)

I think at the end of the day, as long as the admins are staunchly against CP, we should be able to see if any communities are posting it. CP in my opinion is very much like porn in that its hard to define but you know when you see it.

I think that the issue with rule #2 is how much effort it requires from the mods, are they expected to know every character background out there?

At this point, if a smell test is not enough anymore, probably a blanket ban on drawings is the only way for admins to not get threats every other hour, imho obviously

Just voted. But I wanna say with this rule translated from cartoons to real people, a user posting couldn’t even post a picture of Sarah-Michelle Geller in the role of Buffy the Vampire slayer. The character Buffy is a underage teen, but the actor is like 23 or something. This is just a way to translate to the people who don’t look at hentai who think like this.

So that in of itself is stupid. Remove the rule, have mods be more active in removing drawn stuff with like the mentality of “better safe than sorry” I would say.

And it seems people aren’t reading what you are writing, Yay isn’t saying lets allow pedos in here. He is saying lets use moderation more instead of banning a post with a picture of a milf version of Kim Possible.

Simply put.

Also you could have mods have a link to the rules above in all “boards” rule pages with rule34, cartoons and hentai. Maybe add an example like you have done with the links above but write something like “this and that is allowed, but this isn’t” and maybe plainly write “loli isn’t allowed” that will shoo most of the creeps away.

Maybe change Rule 2 to not include the aged up versions of drawings. That is simply what I am trying to say.

I would say “mod discretion” and just ban what a reasonable person would call under 18. Based on the images, #3 is suspect but others clearly come across as adult. We all know Lisa simpson is under age, others are 16 or 17 (Gewn?) but can pass as adult. If noting else, put the ownership on the poster and reporter - in the report from underage ID the character, or if the cant the job is on the poster to provide a link to age.

If a mod gets rid of it, take it in stride and remember why they are - there’s enough source material without pushing our luck.

A rule based on ‘canonical age’ is nonsensical. They’re fictional characters.

Not to mention rule 2 and 3 when put together are incoherent. Either ‘canonical age’ is relevant and rule 3 should go, or it is irrelevant and rule 2 needs to go.

Since the appearance of a character is more important than whatever number an author decided for age, then rule 2 makes sense to remove.

I think from a legal point of view, you could possibly toe a line and go by ‘good faith’ etc. etc. I absolutely would not want to be the one on the hook for any edge cases as an instance host/admin, not in a million years.

But morally I struggle to see a strong argument for not taking a strict line. There are enough adult characters to fantasise about if that’s your thing. Leave the ambiguous shit for the dark corners of the web.

I suspect that any attempt to try and find a compromise here will lead to the instance being quite rightly defederated so that users of other instances don’t have to have apparently underage sexual imagery turning up when they view the ‘All’ tab. I can deal with porn turning up in my feed if I’ve ticked the ‘Show NSFW’ box. But seeing drawn CSAM (that’s what it is, brass tacks) is gross.