[Announcement] Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com has defederated from ani.social - AniSocial
ani.social
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?

  • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
    12·
    1 year ago

    Hey folks,

    So what happened? We manage our defederation process with fediseer. It’s a system that allows us, instance admins, to follow the defederation happening on other selected instances. We generally follow the defederation of sh.itjust.works, lemmy.dbzer0.com, literature.cafe, lemmings.world and a few other instances that have proven to be trustworthy in the past. However, in most of the cases I will also review them manually instead of blindly following them. That’s why I added a censure for ani.social with tag “Loli” as was being reported - contrary to the “CSAM” that was being reported by Lemmy.ml.

    When I was informed that might have been a mistake I delved a bit deeper and saw there was indeed no proof of any CSAM or even LOLI being posted - and I deleted the censure and we federated again. After this I made a post on the ani.social instance about what happened.

    We always put censures in Fediseer to be as transparant as possible but we usually don’t announce blocks on CSAM, Loli or Spam instances. Why? Because for Loli and Csam we don’t want to give those instances extra exposure by announcing them. And for Spam, there’s just too many and it would be hard to keep up.

    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?

    Again, yes we were quick on the buttons but the csam/loli blocking is treated in a “better safe than sorry” way. We do this to keep our users and team safe. And everything was corrected within an acceptable time imo.