Hi all! As promised, here is the proposed text of the newest version of the rules. The staff has gone through like eight drafts and literally thousands and thousands of matrix posts to get here, so please be kind. You can see @limeey's comment on the transparency post if you want more insight into how this sausage was made.
We are opening these rules to commentary from the community before they go into effect. To be clear, this isn't a vote, but we will take all community feedback into account and answer whatever questions we can before finalizing anything.
Please keep in mind that we are not Reddit, we do not have Reddit's resources, and safety and consent are our priorities.
So I understand the prioritizing safety for legal reasons. But I don’t get why you’re so concerned with staying federated with non-NSFW instances. Making a different account for NSFW content is very common, and other NSFW instances are unlikely to be very concerned about fringe (but legal) kink stuff and want to defederate.
If for example lemmy.world (or beehaw if they haven’t already) defed’d this instance, why do we care?
The purpose of the lemmyverse is be federated as a platform overall. If you aren’t at least attempting federation with other instances you’re more or less just a forum (imo)
That and it would cripple the instance. If every single instance defederated from us, user growth would stagnate. Seeing the content federate into all incentivizes people to join in and engage.
Isn't a forum, as a concept, exactly what each Lemmy instance is?
As for growth, you will grow organically without explicit federation with non-nsfw instances. Lemmeynsfw is the porn Lemmy right now. You don't need to have your porn popping up elsewhere for users to find you.
The content of this instance is such that:
User's are likely to create porn alts
User's are going to actively seek you out
Which means growth is guaranteed. Nevermind that explicitly trying to grow a community through non-organic means (where the community needs to make concessions for growth) harm communities instead of making them better.
A lot of it is that for those who havent defederated from us already, their defederation concerns are 99.999999999% likely to be out of legitimate legal or ethical concerns. It take's quite a lot and something particularly egregious for a lemmy instance to truly be defederated permanently by larger instances.
On a semi-related note, I created a tool to check which instances have defederated a certain Lemmy server. It works by getting the servers linked instance list, and for each of those check linked instance list, to see if the first server is blocked. It takes (quite) a few minutes to run, and it only ever hits each server once or twice, so it's pretty chill resource-wise.
As a side-effect, you can also use it to check which of the linked servers are offline in any way, so you could defederate those yourself to limit the amount of needless retries.
As I said, It can take a while to run, so I'll report back once the script is done :)
We are aware of this list and it should be noted that most (or nearly all) of these are due to either legal concerns for hosting links to pornography in their host country or due to “no porn” rules. :)
Which seems fine, why would lemmynsfw try and federate with lots of other non-nsfw instances anyways? People are driven to making nsfw alts, and porn is one of those content types that enjoy long term organic growth without any advertising as users explicitly seek it out.
Much appreciated. There should really be an API function to return who blocked you right out of the gate rather than having to ask around instances you're linked to, but I'm guessing it's not possible because it's an ActivityPub limitation. Not familiar at all with how the protocol works, though.