Recursively removed every linked community that points to an instance that defederated us

@Burger · edit-2 11 months ago

Recursively removed every linked community that points to an instance that defederated us

@shani66 · 11 months ago

Still crazy that the porn instances are trying to distance themselves while they are themselves being locked out of the prudeverse as well.

@Burger · edit-2 11 months ago

Really? I could’ve swore I saw the likes of beehaw and other “safe” instances interact with the vanilla porn instances.

@shani66 · 11 months ago

I remember nsfw being sentenced to the shadow realm by instances i could view, so i just assume it goes beyond just a single instance. Especially with how things are going generally speaking.

@Mousepad · 11 months ago

Yeah, many instances are strictly SFW. Which makes sense and seems fine to me, tbh.

@shani66 · 11 months ago

Seems fucked to me, that people have such an unhealthy relationship with sex that they can’t even simply hide it for themselves but must out right ban it.

@Mousepad · 11 months ago

I don’t see it like that. Many people have two accounts: one for SFW content and one for NSFW, even on something centralized like Reddit. It makes a lot of sense to keep them on separate instance bubbles since NSFW filters don’t distinguish porn and classical art.

@guylookingatnsfw · 10 months ago

I’m still baffled that an ostensibly furry instance defederated.

They are no less “problematic”. The logic that gets this place called out is the exact same one that calls their place “bestiality porn”.

@testing123 · 11 months ago

Hey, just a heads up. I’m the admin from an instance (https://mander.xyz/), and your instance has been added to our block list: https://mander.xyz/post/2573660

I’m letting you know this here in case you want to also clean up the small amount of content from us that you may have fetched.

I am generally very much against defederating because I don’t think it’s nice to cut anyone off from the network. However, when browsing through your site with this account with NSFW enabled, I saw multiple images depicting drawings of minors that made me personally uncomfortable - but, more importantly, I would not want to surprise one of my unsuspecting users who created an account in a science-based instance with these images.

I made an effort to find a reasonable solution that did not involve defederating. For example, I considered blocking only the communities that explicitly allow drawings of children. But what I found is that this content is allowed site-wide, and anyone can create new communities to host this content. This means that I would need to actively monitor the creation of new communities. Also, blocking communities in another instance requires me to first bring the content into mine - again, potentially broadcasting these images to users from my site.

For what it’s worth… Please, do keep running your site in the way that makes you and your community comfortable. This is your space. However, if federating with a broader network is something valuable to you, my recommendation would be to restrict this type of content to a few specific communities and link them in your sidebar. This would allow admins to block those specific communities without having to cut you off completely.

@Burger · 11 months ago

Thank you very much for being upfront and professional about this. I definitely understand that our content makes some people uncomfortable and they don’t want to see it. It’s your server and you can run it the way you want, which is the beauty of free and open sourced software that can be self hosted.

I’ll take what you said about listing the mentioned communities into consideration.

@testing123 · 11 months ago

Thank you for understanding. I know that for many it is a “no-brainer” to defederate with such content, but I genuinely feel bad about defederating with a community. I didn’t do this without putting some thought into it, assessing the content itself, and considering alternatives.

I want to re-emphasize that the concrete reason is that I don’t feel comfortable asking my instance’s users to be willing to see these type of images in their feed if they want to use my instance, because I think it is a big thing to ask of them (or me!). I don’t personally hold a negative sentiment towards you or your community as fellow humans.

@Mousepad · edit-2 11 months ago

I’ve been a user of mander.xyz for a while now (longer than burggit, actually). Generally, I believe instances should leave it up to individual users to block content they do not want to see so long as it isn’t actively harmful or hateful. This case isn’t any different, but I do understand that an instance like mander doesn’t really have anything to do with the type of content you typically see on burggit, so there really isn’t much loss. Indeed, I have never interacted on burggit from my mander account since I do not use mander as a general-purpose account (it has identifying information on it).

Still sad to see, though! I appreciate that you didn’t characterize any of burggit’s users as villains, as many other defederating instance hosts have typically done.

Edit: I do find it strange that you do not name burggit as the instance in your post on mander. What’s the reason for that? Would it not be the most transparent thing to do? I know other instances (lemmynsfw, blahaj, etc) have avoided naming burggit in similar posts in the past to “avoid giving them any more traffic,” but your issue seems not to be a moral one but one of not exposing unwitting mander users to burggit’s content, which obviously would not apply in this situation.

@testing123 · 11 months ago

I agree with you to an extent about users being able to make their own choices, and I even include the following in the registration form:

While strict rules to avoid harmful interactions are enforced on content posted locally to this instance, this instance has a very open federation policy. This means that through the “All” tab of the instance you will encounter content from most other Lemmy instances - including potentially offensive and harmful content. If you are looking for a more curated interaction with the rest of the fediverse, I strongly recommend you to try a different instance with a federation policy that aligns better with your views.

The problem is… Even with this description that acknowledges potentially offensive and harmful content, I think that most people have some reasonable expectations not to encounter drawings of child pornography because it is illegal in many countries and not commonly present online. I think that content such as gore and drawings of child pornography are not things that can be passively consented to with a disclaimer like this one. To be fair to users, I would need to very actively and transparently state that such content is allowed on the site.

Even regular porn makes me uncomfortable, but I tolerate it because I know the average person enjoys it. But drawings of children are too much for me.

Edit: I do find it strange that you do not name burggit as the instance in your post on mander. What’s the reason for that? Would it not be the most transparent thing to do? I know other instances (lemmynsfw, blahaj, etc) have avoided naming burggit in similar posts in the past to “avoid giving them any more traffic,” but your issue seems not to be a moral one but one of not exposing unwitting mander users to burggit’s content, which obviously would not apply in this situation.

Sure, I can be transparent. I have already had users before starting discussions with me when I said I did not want to defederate from exploding-heads, and I found it a difficult experience having to explain and justify different lines of reasoning to different users. That was emotionally tasking and it took a good amount of time and energy.

In this specific case I took some time to build an argument to myself, and I did begin writing a more detailed post. However, I realized that being open about my thought process would put me in a situation where not only might I need to defend my philosophy regarding federation again, but I am also opening myself to argumentation on the topic of people and communities that enjoy looking at explicit drawings depicting children. Thinking of my previous experience, this case felt like potentially a million times worse - because it is not a topic I am personally invested in, and I don’t feel like this is my place to publicly weight on. When I say that I don’t want to bring more attention to this issue in my post I mean more specifically to the defederation event itself. I am being greedy and selfish about my time, energy, and emotional well-being. I don’t want to carry the weight of this discussion.

Being more open and pro-active about the discussion could have been a positive step with regards to reducing the marginalization of your community, but I could also have done damage instead and offended people by trying to talk about a topic I know nothing about. I’m just a guy that likes science and defederated social media, and I don’t watch porn, so I don’t think this is a conversation I belong in.

I ended up deciding not to explain my thought process, but I also did not want to do this sneakily in the background. So, my final decision was to make a post with the minimum number of words I could that would get the point across, while also explicitly stating that I did not want to draw attention to it but that I would be willing to talk about it in the comments or in other places. I am usually willing to discuss things if asked, if I have the time. I also commented here to extend that courtesy to people who might be affected in this instance. I think it’s the right thing to do…

As for the absence of the name: From my point of view, that post can be perceived as me making a moral accusation towards your community. I did not want to include the instance name because I thought this would be me going out of my way to point the finger at you. So, when designing the “shortest possible” post, it was obvious to me that it was better to remove the name as it would avoid drawing any negative attention towards you, users know that they can find it in the block-list if they want to, and it would keep the post shorter. I saw it is as a win/win decision. I now see how you perceived the omission of the link to the site, and so that is a lesson for me. I know it won’t make much of a difference, but I have appended the following line at the end of the post:

If you do enjoy this content and would like to visit the instance, you can find it at: burggit.moe

I wish it had occurred to me to include it in this form when making the post, as this does not look accusatory.

rinkan 輪姦 · 11 months ago

Thinking of my previous experience, this case felt like potentially a million times worse - because it is not a topic I am personally invested in, and I don’t feel like this is my place to publicly weight on. When I say that I don’t want to bring more attention to this issue in my post I mean more specifically to the defederation event itself. I am being greedy and selfish about my time, energy, and emotional well-being. I don’t want to carry the weight of this discussion.

This is entirely reasonable, and I can sympathize.

@Mousepad · 11 months ago

I appreciate the well thought-out response! Clearly you put an appropriate amount of thought into both your choice to defederate and the way you announced it, which I respect completely, even if I disagree with your ultimate decision. I will never fault someone for prioritizing their own mental well-being: it might be selfish, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Thank you for amending your post on mander.

@Kamil118 · 10 months ago

Makes me wish lemmy either had a one-way-defederation (disable importing of posts from given instance, but still allow viewing of posts and/or commenting), or some kind of soft-defederation (don’t display posts on all, only show them to people subscibed).

Doubt a lot of people would use those here, given that most instances that defederate us think we are subhuman, but in some other cases it might be useful solution.

@SmolSlime · 11 months ago

Wow that’s a lot more than I expected

@SquishyPillow · 11 months ago

lolis filter moralfags out

@Burger · 11 months ago

Indeed.

@Burger · 9 months ago

Well, I was going to update the list with new communities that were recently removed, but since I moved to a straight up purge I can’t retrieve them to do that. Sorry, fellas. I’d restore from backup, but I wouldn’t find it worth it for this instance to “go back in time” for this. I need to tweak my script to write to file to record the communities it purged.

@Burger · edit-2 9 months ago

Notable ones that I saw being spat out were when I was glancing at the running script were from hexbear.net and programming.dev. I’ve also updated the https://instances.burggit.moe page to show the current instances we’re still federated with.

@basket · 11 months ago

Thanks, it’s much less cluttered now

@Kamil118 · 11 months ago

Seems like doing this or the recent maintenance might have slightly broke something?

I couldn’t access !ffxiv@possumpat.io before I resubscribed to it. It showed a completely empty community.

If you somebody reads it and has issues accessing a niche community they are probably the only person subscribed to, try resubscribing.

@Burger · edit-2 11 months ago

Might be worth clearing your cache/cookies too. We swapped reverse proxies because Caddy was causing the CPU usage to go through the roof.

This should hopefully be the end of me messing around with things.

@blue_nat · 11 months ago

So if a community on the list above were to re-federates burggit.moe, would that community then have search/subscription functionality restored automatically?

I had subscribed to a few of the yiffit.net communities, which are on the list above. They are no longer on my sub list, and don’t come up in a search.

However burggit.moe still shows up on https://yiffit.net/instances

So I’m not sure if that signifies a potential technical issue, or if the whole federated thing is still a bit of a manual process so it’s possible they did defederate burggit, but their instances list is just out of date.

I did try clearing cache & cookies for both sites just in case, but that did not appear to be the issue.

@Burger · 11 months ago

Is there any evidence that this arrangement is permanent? I actually have the instances who blocked us blackholed internally because some of their content (That hilariously nobody can comment on because they block us) starts showing up on our instance and yiffit is still on that list because they blocked us for a long while.

@Burger · edit-2 11 months ago

To add, I still see exploding-heads federated on their /instances page. Which is what makes me think that this might be temporary. If there’s evidence that they intend on remaining federated with us, I’ll take them off the list and the communities will pop back up.

@blue_nat · 11 months ago

I appreciate the information.

I wasn’t sure how much of all of that was automatic by default, and how much required manual intervention.

Might be they didn’t mean to de-federate, might be the site update they ran a few days ago accidentally rolled back their list. I’ll keep an eye on it for any changes on their end, and if they don’t de-federate again after a week or two, see about creating an account so I can verify.

Thanks.

@Burger · 11 months ago

I went ahead and restored the affected communities and no longer blackhole them after seeing this post: https://yiffit.net/post/1262408 . I guess we’ll see what actions they take for our loli content and hope that it’s just blocking the offending communities on their end. I’m still a bit leery about the whole thing, given they’re still federating exploding-heads.

The other ones that were created during when they defederated us “should” pop up too.

@raman_klogius · edit-2 11 months ago

Can you sort the list alphabetically? That would help immensely.

Anyway, there goes my !masturbationhentai@lemmynsfw.com subscription.

@Burger · 11 months ago

Sure thing. Gimme a sec.

@Burger · 11 months ago

Done.