Context: This is a test of looping the community into our decision-making process via smaller posts on !meta. No promises that this will be a regular thing; this was time-consuming to write up. And likewise do let us know if this feels spammy!
After some bouncing around with the team internally, here is what we’ve converged on for NSFW communities.
Key considerations
Arguments for
- Sexuality is a huge part of the human experience, and so we should support this to some extent
- Reddit proves that it’s possible to host this content without degenerating
- This might be a kinda fun way of growing the userbase if done right!
Arguments against
- Unlike reddit, we don’t have infrastructure to shield mods and the admin team from dealing with unsavory and traumatising content
- People will always push boundaries. So if we allow explicit content, there will be people who post CP and other illegal stuff, e.g. leaked, personal, and private
- Some of this may create reporting obligations: even without legal obligations there are moral obligations
- This is not the job our team signed up to do
- If NSFW content starts becoming a big draw this might have unwanted effects on our userbase composition
- Hosting NSFW content may risk attracting unwanted official attention, especially if we grow.
- This puts the site and the admin team at risk.
- Counterpoint: It’s possible we’re actually safe as we’re semi-anonymous and not hosted locally. But we haven’t got the spare capacity to work through the legality + exposure risk right now.
Draft decision
NSFW text content: Generally welcome
- Gives us most of the benefits without most of the risks.
- (There are erotic novels in every MPH in the city right now!)
NSFW image content: Mature content is fine, sexually explicit content is not
- Lots of media seem to converge on two separate lines which divide the above (broadcasting, ESRB, YouTube, Pixiv, etc)
- Basically, thirsty content is welcome, but pornography and explicit content meant to be sexually gratifying is not
- For specifics, we’ll probably refer out to the YouTube policy. It draws very clean and useful lines on this, and is obviously battle-tested. (We might archive a copy of this for easy reference)
- We can always revisit this choice as we grow, but this only seems likely if (a) Lemmy starts providing safety infrastructure we can lean on, and (b) we get much more clarity on our legal and other exposure
General limits: Don’t be a scumbag
- Regardless of format, if you post CP, leak personal and private content, etc, you’re going to get a ban (and possibly other consequences)
- I don’t feel we need to set out a full list of scumbaggery here at this stage. And we hopefully won’t have to for some time yet
(Thanks @weecious and @cendawanita for contributing initial thinking on this!)
What happens now: We’ll let this sit for a week for public comment, and make updates if needed. And then we’ll mark this as finalised and link to it from sitewide policy places.
Additional thoughts welcome if any!
I’ll leave my opinion from the prior discussion of this topic here:
I for one against any illegal content from being hosted and displayed here, this include pornography. The reason being, i’m here for a hobby, i do not get paid to do this, i do not have the resource nor time to play with the authority were they found our site hosting and distributing pornography, and i do not want a hobby that could potentially ruin my life, no matter how small that chance is. This is an offence under the Malaysia law, and most of the admin live in Malaysia and therefore have to abide the Malaysia law. Facebook aren’t hosted in Malaysia either but people get into trouble nonetheless. It’s not moral issue, it’s legal issue. This also extend to other illegal stuff, including weed and firearm.
Second, hosting graphical porn mean there need to be heavily moderated, any non-consensual one need to be removed(like the owner of the material doesn’t give consent to get it posted). This is a moral one, consent in sex is very important, and consent in posting the recorded sex bear the same weight. iirc r/malaysiangonewild almost got into trouble with reddit and authority because of this.
Third, do remember who is leading MCMC. Fahmi Fadzil is known for strong arming anyone into submission, in a very dictator way. All the socmed listen and bow to him, and he recently force Telegram into cooperation after months of getting ignored. We’re merely an ant in comparison to them. Fanfiction is blocked and still is to this day, no one know why. If we get any mcmc report, consider this site dead.
Fourth, lemmyNSFW exists, and has better browsing experience. They patched and modify the Lemmy UI themselves to fit their need(yes i do my research).
However, i draw the line on text-based story. As long as it’s properly marked, it’s a go. Not so sure about thirst-trap pic, it might flood the frontpage and change the landscape of monyet.cc.
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IMO the drawbacks far outweigh any benefit you’d get from hosting NSFW communities here. The admins would have more work monitoring explicit content to determine whether they’re valid (i.e. not porn or disguised ads).
Since this community is small, the rate of new posts being made is also pretty slow. You’d run into the risk of having “thirst-posts” become the majority of new content (let’s face it, the Internet is horny). Nothing against sex, but I don’t think that would be great for a country-focused instance.
For me, the legal and modding burden is the main point of consideration - not only for the team here, but also let’s face it, we live in a society with norms that’s not at all pro-victim and laws that’s not really practiced to protect spicy speech, without even thinking about the immorality of it.
I do agree if we proceed, to remove image embeds as a start.
That’s all thinking of NSFW specifically in pornographic (and not at all the same but functionally in our society is, also non-heterosexual) material.
But what about NSFW in sharing typical slice of life consensual stuff (this will never include child pornography or bestiality)? I think this is where mod discretion guidance needs to be hashed out a bit more.
What about NSFW in terms of art? Typical edge case would be discussing a docu on a human trafficking ring vs starting a thread in the anime sub about a lolicon show. Once we can articulate the distinction, I think that’s a good start.
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well summarised pros and cons. may i suggest that maybe we can do a trial run to see how it’s like say, over a 3-month period? reason being - it’s the instance’s first ever NSFW, and being such a new platform it seems difficult to predict what sort of risk will be present.
since it’s explicit from the outset that there will no graphical and explicit content, is it possible to just disable image content as a whole? That way at least the mods do not have to see some stuff they wished they didn’t see LOL. downside is perhaps occasionally we see funny NSFW memes we can’t share it. Other than that i really do not know what kind of NSFW photo a user can upload… Orgy posters maybe?
and another thing - what sort of content do we have in mind on the NSFW community? would it be like the dating community, except there’s no filter and we could talk about more NSFW things in the same mature manner?
Hey, thanks for this and sorry I haven’t got back to you on my suggestion.
I am 50/50 about allowing NSFW pictures, for there needs to be a heavily regulated community. Like Leon say (paraphrasing), he’s here for a hobby, and doesn’t want this to turn into an unpaid job. So, unless the creator of the community is willing to put in the hard (heh) work, it’s a no go.
I’m also worried about the means the contents are acquired, as we have seen a lot of stolen and leaked nudes posted on r/malaysiagonewild and other related MY NSFW stuff, and I once saw someone posting a teenager’s nude on r/my, which was promptly removed by you @dcx, if my memory serves.
Text based NSFW contents, including questions should be OK, as long as it doesn’t break any law.
Maybe a /c/MalaysiansGoneWild over at lemmynsfw.com is good enough.
Looks like we’re gonna have to decide, sooner rather than later (Im at work but I don’t dare to click on the c/sflix posts to double check)
Mischief managed
there’s still a link in the community description.
that community should probably just be deleted, otherwise it’ll continue collecting subscribers.
Nuked!
Pretty much solid to me.
Imo here we have a distinct problem of there not being a robust formal education about sexuality and ethics surrounding it. I feel like a lot of people aren’t clear about the lines between what’s acceptable and what isn’t. There’s bound to be incidents of underage, leaked, and noncon revenge stuffs leaking in. If we limit to just thirst content it’d still be bearable to moderate.
And here’s where the federation model shines. Horny mofos can just spin their own instance for the more raunchy stuffs beyond what we would accept. Abam pulis are welcome to swat there instead. 😜
edit: reading others’ comments made me reconsider, even thirst content. I feel like the major nsfw Lemmy instances would be more prepared for this type of content.
I’m now leaning more towards framing them as art and literature. Think a story with a bit of spicy images thrown in. Think 80s Mastika.
