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2 yr. ago

  • I thought we already drew that line: 18 years of age, able to consent, and consenting. For context: I looked at this article where it is said Shauna Rae is 22 years old, however due to a condition her growth was stunted. I don't think we should tell her not to date or do explicit things with her partner, when she finds one. It's her body, and she is an adult. Similar to others with growth related conditions, such as dwarfism, or simply people who look petite even after they've come of age, who also get thrown under the bus regularly.

    Let's actually go that extra step and pretend she did make sexually explicit content. Now what? It immediately feels very wrong. Put that aside. I'm guessing most people are going to be worried about those with certain urges getting their rocks off..? (Honestly, not sure what to call them here, I was already unfamiliar with the term "CSAM", so I'll just leave it at that.) Now there's content that's legal and hasn't harmed a child. That seems ... better than the alternative?

    I don't think a person with unhealthy sexual urges gets to choose whether they have these urges or not. Demonizing them to the degree that we are, leads to most of them not being able to get the help they need. If it can't be done by other means such as therapy, or therapy is not available, an outlet might help. And whether that's "questionable" but legal porn, roleplaying, or other content or activities involving consenting adults that seems to tick the right boxes, ... that's up to them, not us. Again, miles better than the alternative, even if the immediate reaction is to be disgusted.

    It's an incredibly delicate problem. I'd say the right approach would be to do more scientific studies, but I imagine not many have or will be done because of the societal taboo. It's also very iffy trying to search for existing research on this matter on the internet, and even if I could find some, I don't have the expertise to know how scientifically sound it is.

    In fact, in writing this and continuously re-reading my comment, I keep feeling like the points I'm making are scarily close to those of an apologist, or worse, someone who wants to normalize the sexualization of minors. I want to make it clear that I'm 100% against this. But I'm also against shaming the bodies of adults, telling them what they can't and can't do, because it makes me feel uncomfortable. (And I want to note that this is not meant to be an argument relating to the thread as a whole, as it would not want to tell the admins to host content I hypothesized in this post.)

  • I think both instance admins have a valid stance on the matter. lemmynsfw appears to take reports very seriously and if necessary does age verification of questionable posts, something that likely takes a lot of time and effort. Blahaj Lemmy doesn't like the idea of a community that's dedicated to "adults that look or dress child-like". While I understand the immediate (and perhaps somewhat reactionary) concern that might raise, is this concern based in fact, or in emotion?

    Personally I'm in the camp of "let consenting adults do adult things", whether that involves fetishes that are typically thought of as gross, dressing up in clothes or doing activities typically associated with younger ages, or simply having a body that appears underage to the average viewer. As the lemmynsfw admin mentioned, such persons have the right to lust and be lusted after, too. That's why, as a society, we decided to draw the line at 18 years old, right?

    I believe the concern is not that such content is not supposed to exist or be shared, but rather that it's collected within a community. And I think the assumption here is that it makes it easy for "certain people" to find this content. But if it is in fact legal, and well moderated, then is there a problem? I don't believe there is evidence that seeing such content could change your sexual preferences. On the other hand, saying such communities should not exist could send the wrong message, along the lines of "this is weird and should not exist", which might be what was meant with "body shaming".

    I'm trying to make sense of the situation here and possibly try to deescalate things, as I do believe lemmynsfw approach to moderation otherwise appears to be very much compatible with Blahaj Lemmy. Is there a potential future where this decision is reconsidered? Would there be some sort of middle-ground that admins from both instances could meet and come to an understanding?

  • On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they've boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post's content and such.

    Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as "special users". Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

    This part I'm not entirely sure on but I believe it's how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there's a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you're posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community's handle.

    Because you can't follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don't involve Lemmy never end up being "federated", meaning Lemmy instances don't get notified of these posts, so they don't end up being "copied". This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn't know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

    This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

    To summarize: Lemmy doesn't display Mastodon posts because it doesn't have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

  • Ah okay that's less problematic. But could it still cause problems if a rogue moderator decides to be trouble for the instance admins?

  • Or if a bot on a bigot instance is set up to automatically close all reports, none of the other instances will ever see it? That does sound like a bad implementation.

  • Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

  • Gitea was taken over by a for-profit company, Forgejo is a fork by the previous maintainers to continue it fully FOSS without any of the shenanigans. See also their FAQ.

  • I agree with this wholeheartedly, though I'll probably have to actually go ahead and live by it too.

    Relatedly, what does happen when you report a post or comment? Who does it go to? Presumably the community's moderators, but which of the admins receive the report? There's potentially three instances involved: Your own, the instance of the poster, and the instance that hosts the community it was posted to.

  • Incorrect. I'm fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don't want to see.

    However, I'm allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn't allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don't need to all block the content they don't like manually. It's my instance admin's choice, and my choice to go with their instance.

  • If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don't have to sign up to one that does something you don't like.

    Besides, you don't seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn't for the ability to defederate, we'd have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn't matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

  • Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

    Say you have an instance with a "no-NSFW" rule, for people who don't want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn't have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in "All".

  • Just yesterday I replied to a post where a similar question was asked, so I hope it's okay if I just copy-paste my answer:

    The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

    • Are you interested in tech? There's a couple of tech-focused instances.
    • Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
    • Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
    • Maybe you're interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

    Why? When you're looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I'm making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

    For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you're just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don't mind, but I feel like it's good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

    How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There's a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.

  • It's a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it's like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it's posted publicly to view.

    As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I'm guessing it's not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.

    (But hey, IANAL.)

  • If you go by what the loudest ones are saying about the headphone jack removal, then yes, it does give the appearance that it's a very unpopular change. However if you were to just ask random people on the street if they use(d) their headphone jack and what they think of this change, you'll probably find there's not a lot of vocal people out there that would not buy a phone just because it was missing it. That's why Fairphone did their market research, right? Of course it's still up for debate whether that was the right choice. And personally I would also prefer if the headphone jack was still default on phones.

  • Also see their official response on the audio jack removal.

    TL;DR:

    • Modularity and its influence on the phone’s size and weight
    • Market and legislative trends (headphone jack is getting less popular)
    • Longevity (less ports = less vulnerable to dust, water and general wear?)
  • Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it's a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn't actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It's basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

    I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person's day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?