To anyone who is not familiar with the situation, please read our previous post
[https://ani.social/post/863176] for context. Please do not say anything hateful
toward the concerned instances’ admins. — ## What happened? A few hours ago,
Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com has defederated from ani.social
[https://defed.xyz/check/ani.social], following the events of Lemmy.ml
defederating from ani.social on November 3 [https://ani.social/post/863176].
Lemmy.World has given a censure on Fediseer
[https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/ani.social] with the reason being
“loli”. lemmy.dbzer0.com [http://lemmy.dbzer0.com] has not given a reason for
defederation as of the moment. We disagree with anyone claiming that ani.social
intentionally and knowingly hosts CSAM. We would like to remind everyone that
ani.social has a content policy regarding CSAM content
[https://ani.social/legal] since day one. Specifically, our content policy
states the following: > 7. Do not submit content depicting a child (both real
and virtual) engaged or involved in explicit sexual activities. A child is
defined as a person who is under 18 years old; or a person, regardless of age,
who is presented, depicted or portrayed as under 18 years old. To provide some
context, the Lemmy developers excluded ani.social from the recently launched
join-lemmy.org redesign without any clear reason provided
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/commit/d17c4d7d2fbeafb6e39000332d0ac21499de5b47].
My pull request to remove ani.social from the exclude-list was denied for the
reason being that ani.social is “full of CSAM”
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/266]. Shortly after, ani.social
was defederated from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml]. The full story may be found on
the previous thread [https://ani.social/post/863176]. Numerous threads have
since spawned, many of which have comments state that there is no evidence of
the claim that ani.social is “full of CSAM” and that the decision was unfair.
These threads include: - https://ani.social/post/863176
[https://ani.social/post/863176] - https://lemmy.ml/post/7406051
[https://lemmy.ml/post/7406051] - https://lemmy.world/post/7714824
[https://lemmy.world/post/7714824] - https://sh.itjust.works/post/8411770
[https://sh.itjust.works/post/8411770] - https://lemmy.ml/post/7437529
[https://lemmy.ml/post/7437529] We respectfully ask the admins of Lemmy.World,
lemmy.dbzer0.com [http://lemmy.dbzer0.com], and Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] to
review the situation and our policies, and consider reversing your decision if
there is no evidence that ani.social intentionally and knowingly hosts CSAM. ##
What now? If you are a user of ani.social and wish to see content from
Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com [http://lemmy.dbzer0.com], we kindly ask you to
move to a different instance that is federated with all three instances. If you
are a user of Lemmy.World or lemmy.dbzer0.com [http://lemmy.dbzer0.com] and wish
to see content from ani.social, we kindly ask you to send a request to your
respective admins to reverse their decisions after reviewing the situation. To
all other Fediverse instance admins, we kindly ask you to carefully review our
instance and its policies before defederating from us. To all ani.social users,
please do not forget to report content that violates our content policy
[https://ani.social/legal]. ## My personal thoughts As the admin of ani.social,
I sincerely apologize to all our users regarding the defederation from three
major Lemmy instances. I believe that this is my fault for not communicating our
policies clearly enough. I will continue working toward a solution regarding
this matter so please be patient. Thank you for reading this, and I appreciate
everyone’s support.
EDIT: As noted in the linked post, the defederation was a mistake and has been reversed. Thank you to the lemmy.world admins for reviewing this quickly.
I’m not a lemmy.world user, so I’m not directly affected by this defederation. I am a fan of both anime and the fediverse in general though, so I’m concerned about an apparent crackdown on my hobby and by what seems to be an increasingly damaging flaw in the fediverse model.
A few days ago. lemmy.ml defederated from ani.social, a lemmy instance specialized in anime. The only explanation given by Dessalines (lead dev of lemmy, owner of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml) was that it was “full of CSAM”. As far as anyone who’s commented can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this whatsoever (see post link for an overview of the discussions). The only CSAM here appears to be in Dessalines’ head.
That defederation was annoying, but not all that surprising. Dessalines and his fellow lead dev Nutomic are tankies, and tankies often seem to have a weird hatred of anime fans. The two of them have a history of making self-marginalizing decisions, so the obvious course of action is to just point them out so that people gradually abandon lemmy.ml, and hopefully eventually fork the lemmy codebase.
However, today I found out that lemmy.world had also defederated ani.social, again with no evidence presented for the decision. It looks like the LW admins are just rubber-stamping the bad decision of the lemmy.ml admins, without bothering to investigate at all.
We really can’t afford to have the most popular lemmy instance behaving like this. The LW admin team has generally shown more professionalism in that past, so what gives?
They refederated a couple hours ago (source). @[email protected] made a post clarifying things over in the meta thread on ani.social’s site and cleared things up.
I understand people’s frustrations with seemingly arbitrary moderation decisions like this sometimes, but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes making calls like that for a large instance like this. It is heartening to see that the review process did not take long and the decision reversed fairly quickly (<12 hours). This stands in contrast to the lemmy.ml admins that defederated ani.social for seemingly no reason and locked all discussion about it and it still stands. So, props to antik and LW admins on this one.
They refederated a couple hours ago (source). @[email protected] made a post clarifying things over in the meta thread on ani.social’s site and cleared things up.
I understand people’s frustrations with seemingly arbitrary moderation decisions like this sometimes, but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes making calls like that for a large instance like this. It is heartening to see that the review process did not take long and the decision reversed fairly quickly (<12 hours). This stands in contrast to the lemmy.ml admins that defederated ani.social for seemingly no reason and locked all discussion about it and it still stands. So, props to antik and LW admins on this one.