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[Announcement] Lemmy.ml has defederated from ani.social (and what this means for us) - AniSocial
ani.socialPlease do not say anything hateful to the Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] admins or
the developers. Before commenting on this thread, please read the post
completely. — We (ani.social) have been defederated from Lemmy.ml
[http://Lemmy.ml] a few hours ago presumably for the reason of being “full of
CSAM” which I disagree. ## What happened? The Lemmy developers recently launched
the new redesigned join-lemmy.org [https://join-lemmy.org] webpage which
provides information about Lemmy and a list of servers that people can join. The
redesign looks great! It details a lot of new and useful stuff such as a
categorized server list and mobile apps. However, I noticed that our instance
(ani.social) was not in the list despite previously being there before the
redesign. After looking through the joinlemmy-site code
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site], I discovered that ani.social was
added to the “excluded” list in a commit a few weeks ago
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/commit/d17c4d7d2fbeafb6e39000332d0ac21499de5b47].
I thought that this was a mistake so I made a pull request
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/266] to remove us from the
excluded list (and also to add our instance’s category and language).
Unfortunately, the pull request was closed with a comment that reads “No, that
is full of CSAM”. The thread was locked so I couldn’t reply. I tried to reach
out to the developers via Matrix, politely explaining that ani.social has a
content policy rule against CSAM [https://ani.social/legal] which reads: > 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. Unfortunately, my invitation was rejected and I
did not hear back from them. Shortly after, I discovered that Lemmy.ml had
defederated from ani.social [https://lemmy.ml/instances]. The last post
ani.social received from Lemmy.ml [https://ani.social/post/861241] was just
after the pull request was closed. ## What does this mean? This means that no
user from ani.social can interact with communities from Lemmy.ml
[http://Lemmy.ml] and vice versa. This affects those who subscribe to
communities from that instance. This also affects the anime community on Lemmy
as a whole because the biggest anime discussion community resides on Lemmy.ml
[http://Lemmy.ml] (!anime@lemmy.ml [/c/anime@lemmy.ml]) in which their episode
discussion bot, @shinobu@ani.social, is hosted here. It’s very concerning that
as an anime-themed instance, we’re now completely disconnected from this
community and other related communities. This also affects ani.social in the
long run as our exclusion from the join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org]
webpage will reduce our visibility. The exclusion from join-lemmy.org
[http://join-lemmy.org] and defederation from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] may
also prompt other instance admins to defederate from us. Generally, ani.social
will be seen in a very bad light. As the admin of ani.social, I genuinely feel
heartbroken after what had happened. Not only do I feel like I’m doing a poor
job of building ani.social but I also feel like I’ve disrespected the work of
the Lemmy developers. I really apologize to those who are affected by this. I
hope that this is just a misunderstanding and I will do my best to resolve this
problem.
I mean, I would prefer to take them at their word before assuming a secret hidden motive.
They stated they think cartoon shows with children are inherently sexual. If they believe that, Ill believe them. They think kids are porn.
That one is a very complicated issue.
On one hand, the anime community, especially those within the lolicon community, have a pedo problem. It’s less serious in Japan (I’ve seen some artists being really mad at those who use the “pedo” tag on Pixiv), but the west just glorifies it as “gatekeeping”, which they think will keep the fandom pure of outside influences, while they’re being infiltrated by the right. This leads to them using right wing “arguments”, like argument from hypocrisy, the whole “people who see X are the real X”, or the whole “the LGBTQ+ are the real predators”.
On the other hand, one could argue that not even all “loli” type characters are canonically kids, some real women find comfort in them (a lot of men really need certain “adult signifiers”, and seen a lot of women being harassed for not looking or talking mature enough), and the evidence trying to tie the “just drawings” to real harm is really foggy and often seem to be the same exact ones used by anti-porn activists to try to bullshit their will onto other people through the law (see the ban on “extreme pornography” in the UK, where people argued it would normalize “dangerous sexual acts”). Hell, I remember people fearing pubic hair removal will lead to the normalization of pedophilia since I remember pubic hair removal being a thing.