A true champion of free speech. 🙄

I love the idea, but I can’t see it actually working. Developers would just sell even more games as subscriptions instead of selling licenses, regardless of any interactive online content or lack thereof. (Think of EA’s 2013 release of SimCity with always-on DRM, for example.) Then when they want to shut their servers down, they just stop selling subscriptions and wait until the last one expires.

After reading the community’s pinned “Rules Breakdown” post, I can easily see how Your post violated their rules. 🤷‍♀️ And as another poster in this thread points out, it appears You’re just on a time-out, not a perma-ban.

Also, I will capitalize “you” for You as an act of politeness, but I very strongly disagree with characterizing this as “misgendering”, even after reading Your “Introduction to capitalised pronouns” post. Yes, grammar is socially defined and arbitrary. For example, the only reason African-American Vernacular English is labelled “improper” is because so many (white) people with power say so — there’s nothing inherently worse or better about it. However, it’s still necessary to reach consensus on the meaning of words, else no one could be understood.

Capitalization of Your pronoun is clearly very important to You, and it would be thus be unkind of me to refuse to accommodate You when it’s pointed out, but English is not a language where every pronoun is gendered. The capitalized version is an honorific form of the same pronoun, not a different pronoun altogether. And generally speaking, the use of honorifics (“sir” and “ma’am” being the most common ones) is becoming far less common these days. Perhaps it’s because honorifics are most frequently used to establish dominance and subservience roles, whether that be in customer service roles (“yes, sir”) or governing roles (“yes, Your Honour” or “yes, Your Majesty”). To borrow Your own example, even many Christians now refer to their god as “he” rather than “He” in written language. And of course, those of us who totally reject the notion of gods certainly don’t. Your insistence on capitalization as respect for Your divinity makes me genuinely uncomfortable as someone who doesn’t believe in divinity at all and certainly shouldn’t feel subservient to You.

How is anyone supposed to determine whether this was a good idea or not

Ada’s judgment is not infallible, but I’d rather trust her judgment than go personally look for something she initially (and admitted mistakenly) thought was CSAM. There are two possible outcomes: (1) I see something that looks similar to CSAM to me and I feel gross about it, or (2) I don’t see any problem with the content, but it doesn’t change anything because she’s the admin here and is still unwilling to host copies of it on her server where she evaluates anything that gets reported.

In either case, I can still enjoy content from LemmyNSFW elsewhere if I so choose — just not at Blahaj Zone.

And this whole debate is literally declaring that legal adults don’t look right, and shouldn’t be allowed to post explicit images

I think the two sides here are having different debates. Yes, there are legal adults who may appear underage, and they should have the same freedom any other adult has to post explicit pictures of themselves if they so choose. But a community that specifically encourages “child-like” content (as the community’s rules said at the time this decision was made) is going to gather multiple examples of this. Even if Ada fully trusts LemmyNSFW’s admins to 100% prevent any real CSAM from being federated, she’d still be exposed to reports of “potential CSAM” from there. She’s a community-building volunteer who willingly examines reported content that gets federated to Blahaj Zone, but she doesn’t want to view any more of it than is strictly necessary to protect her community. So she’s unwilling to federate with an instance that knowingly hosts such a community (even if the content is 100% legal) because it would cause more reports as time goes on. The content also upsets her on a personal level, which is fine — she’s a human being and is allowed to have feelings.

Other admins at other instances might not have the same aversion to this specific type of legal content that Ada does, so maybe they don’t mind having it copied onto their servers. That’s cool. The Fediverse is great like that, users aren’t stuck with the decisions of any single person in charge. Ada announced her decision so that all we Blahaj Zone users would know about it, and if any of us feel strongly enough (and clearly a number of people do), we can vote with our feet and go use one of those other instances so we also don’t lose access to the communities we use here.

This is my final comment on the matter. You may have the last word if you wish.

Is it actually possible to instance-level ban a community that’s hosted by another instance without defederating? I’m under the belief that it isn’t, but if I’m wrong on that, then I think I’d agree with you here.

Let me know when you find out what the word “disingenuous” means.

Oh please, no one here is calling anyone’s body “morally wrong”.

I don’t need to “see if [I] agree or disagree with [the admin’s] assessment.” It wouldn’t make any difference whether I do or not. And it doesn’t matter what the community’s name is. By going to look, I’d be knowingly putting myself in a position to potentially see something that looks like CSAM. Why would I want to do that??

But a lot of people made the choice to do that, presumably for the sake of arguing with an admin on an instance many of them don’t even use. That is disheartening.

Don’t be disingenuous. Genuine consent practices also consider that not everyone else consents to witnessing their play, so they don’t do it where it’s not welcomed. And it’s not welcomed on Blahaj Zone, in this case. That’s all.

It’s not about whether the community actually skirts the line or not. It’s about how many people thought “gee, someone thinks these pictures are CSAM-adjacent, I need to go see for myself”. That’s disheartening.

Sometimes they go together, sometimes they don’t.

Yeah, see, it’s that conflation of “emotional” and “not thinking clearly” that bothers me. Those aren’t the same thing, despite the dominant cultural narrative to the contrary. Sometimes they go together, sometimes they don’t.

I am very disheartened by the number of people replying here who read “a community skirting the line trying to look like CSAM” and felt the need to go purposefully seek out that community to look through its images.

is this concern based in fact, or emotion?

Ada was clear in another comment thread that yes, emotion was absolutely involved in her decision. That isn’t a bad thing. Why is there a social attitude that decision-making is only valid if it’s cold and unfeeling?

Personally I’m in the camp of “let consenting adults do adult things”

Me too. I don’t think anyone is arguing against that. Anyone can still access LemmyNSFW’s content elsewhere, Blahaj Zone simply isn’t going to relay it anymore because some of it is incompatible with Ada’s goals in nurturing this community.

But if it is in fact legal, and well moderated, then is there a problem?

Yes. Legality has nothing to do with acceptability. This instance already bans lots of content that doesn’t actually violate any laws. It’s a judgment call.

Honestly without anyone citing the actual post in question it’s literally impossible for any of us to make up our own minds on the content. All we have is one admin’s word vs another.

Sure, but this isn’t a poll. This is an admin decision that has been made. I appreciate knowing that she made it and why. And if the material looks like CSAM to her — even if it’s actually not — then of course she wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) point anyone to it.

At the same time it does kinda seem like the blahaj admins wanted to defederate anyway and finally found a convenient scapegoat

She doesn’t need a scapegoat, she’s the Blahaj Zone admin. If she’d wanted to defederate with them before today, nothing was stopping her. To the contrary, a request had already been made for this action about a month ago and Ada said “I haven’t seen any reports coming through for content from that instance, which makes it hard to choose to defederate, because I haven’t seen any examples of the problems you describe to get a sense of how the admins are responding.”

it seems odd that one would completely defederate an entire instance over a single post.

Except she didn’t. She defederated because of the LemmyNSFW admins’ response (or lack thereof) to the problematic content they were federating outward and thus got copied onto a storage device that Ada is responsible for. She clearly doesn’t need the ethical nor the potential legal headaches.

People act like defederation is some horrible thing, but really, it’s one of the things that makes the Fediverse so good. Centralized platforms have executives that have to answer to the entire user base plus advertisers, and everyone is stuck with their decisions. On Lemmy, instance admins make the best decisions for the community they want to build, and any user who doesn’t like it can set up a secondary account or fully migrate to another instance that fits their needs better without losing access to their social network.

I enjoy NSFW content, but I certainly don’t want to stumble into “how close to CSAM can we get while staying technically legal?” content. And the bullshit lie about this being “body shaming” pisses me off.

This admin decision obviously isn’t up for a vote, but it’s just so obviously the right call. Thank you Ada for handling this, and I’m sorry (in the Canadian way, not the guilty way 😉🇨🇦) you had to see any of that.

Good question! Whether it’s actually infringement is a legal judgment I’m certainly not qualified to make. 🙂 But my understanding is that it hinges on whether a court thinks a “reasonable person” could be confused. For example, a clothing brand called “Firefoxy” would probably be in the clear since Mozilla isn’t in the clothing business. And maybe even a clothing brand named “Firefox” might be okay! For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records (founded by The Beatles) coexisted nicely for a long time until Apple Computer started getting into the music-selling business. I forget how it got resolved (maybe a licensing agreement?) but The Beatles’ music wasn’t available on the iTunes Music Store for a looooong time while that dispute was going on.

Firefish is an online service and software package, the very space Mozilla operates in, so there’s at least a case to be made that reasonable people might incorrectly assume it’s from Mozilla. It’s come up many times in this discussion already, and we as active Fediverse users are already pretty well informed about this!

Truthfully, bigotry and harmful content should be reported, not downvoted. 🙂 Our local admins are very responsive, and they’ll defederate from any other instances that sanction or defend that stuff.

The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.

(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)

No worries, things happen — and you’re community-building volunteers, not an on-call rotation. 💜 I’m just glad we’re back now! Thanks for your efforts during these past 24 hours. 🏳️‍⚧️😊