The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance. That’ll probably annoy the moderators of your server, but you’ll have to ask them to be sure.
If you upload your porn some place else and submit the video/image link, the file should never hit your instance.
There’s also the profile page to consider. Even if you don’t upload anything to your own instance, your posts will show up on your profile for people browsing your instance. Your instance moderators will have to decide if that’s a problem or not.
I’d think anything flagged correctly and hosted on a porn friendly site should be alright, but I’m no moderator.
The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance.
That seems like kind of a problem/bad design. The actual text content of the post is stored on the other instance right? If the moderator of the other instance deletes your post, does the embedded media get deleted off your instance?
This is not at all how I assumed this would work, and raises some questions about the value of federation if you’re going to end up needing to manage multiple logins on multiple instances in order to manage their various posting policies.
I believe text is indeed mirrored. Images will disappear if the instance admin deletes them, though.
I don’t think you’ll end up with many accounts, to be honest. The three categories I’ve encountered on Lemmy so far are “normal”, “porn”, and “extremist”. Blocking lemmygrad seems to have gotten rid of most of the extremists and so far the porn accounts all seem to be isolates in their own little section of the Fediverse.
I’d think a normal person would maybe need a second account for browsing porn, but that’s it.
You’ll always be subject to other servers’ posting policies but when we’re talking about communities that just makes sense. You won’t be allowed to post hardcore porn in c/knitting even if the c/porn community doesn’t mind. Besides, communities exist on specific servers, so they should automatically follow the posting guidelines of the servers they’re on or risk getting deleted.
The only hairy issue I can think of is the fact that uploaded media automatically gets uploaded to your instance. That may confuse people.
Yeah, it was that last point that’s the sticking point. Like you I agree and would expect that when you post to a community you follow that communities guidelines, but since media apparently uploads to your instance not the instance hosting the community now you’re getting a 3rd party involved. If media was hosted on the same instance of the community I don’t think we’d have a problem and you wouldn’t need to worry about violating the posting guidelines of your home instance.
Personally, while I might create a “normal” account and a porn account, I definitely don’t want to feel like I have to do that. I think you should be able to create your account in any instance you want and post to any community you want (assuming said community isn’t on an instance which has had federation blocked from your home instance) without having to worry about the content rules of your home instance. I definitely think the embedded media handling needs to have a second look given to it.
As long as you’re staying aware of what you’re doing and your porn instance doesn’t break any laws (the Fediverse does have some defederated servers because of “loli” porn…) I think you could just get away with a single account, specifically one on the most permissive server. At least I don’t see why normal posts from lenny.xxx accounts would need to be blocked on other servers.
The real challenge is moderation. Porn servers often attract people who are not exactly model citizens and without strict and clear moderation, an instance can quickly become a cesspool. Once that happens, other servers start blocking that instance and your account on that server loses some of the benefits of the Fediverse.
With how expensive hosting is, I expect a lot of content to be hosted by third parties anyway. Imgur seems to be a popular choice.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
It should be noted that the content storage policy depends on your platform of choice, though. kbin and Mastodon will cache/mirror content from other servers into their local cache, for example.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
Wouldn’t you need to moderate the contents of the community anyway? Does it fundamentally change things whether the cross posting is done via posting from a different instance or by the poster just switching accounts? In either case the post is ending up in the community and you still need to moderate it. Having media stored in your home instance just makes things really awkward because now as a user I have to contend with both the server wide rules of my home instance and the rules of the community I’m posting in. I just worry we’re going to see things fracture into two nearly completely separate fediverses, there will be the NSFW adult fediverse, and then the SFW fediverse and you won’t be able to subscribe to content from one on the other.
With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).
The way Lemmy hosting works is that it you upload a picture though the new post form, you upload that file to your instance. That’ll probably annoy the moderators of your server, but you’ll have to ask them to be sure.
If you upload your porn some place else and submit the video/image link, the file should never hit your instance.
There’s also the profile page to consider. Even if you don’t upload anything to your own instance, your posts will show up on your profile for people browsing your instance. Your instance moderators will have to decide if that’s a problem or not.
I’d think anything flagged correctly and hosted on a porn friendly site should be alright, but I’m no moderator.
That seems like kind of a problem/bad design. The actual text content of the post is stored on the other instance right? If the moderator of the other instance deletes your post, does the embedded media get deleted off your instance?
This is not at all how I assumed this would work, and raises some questions about the value of federation if you’re going to end up needing to manage multiple logins on multiple instances in order to manage their various posting policies.
I believe text is indeed mirrored. Images will disappear if the instance admin deletes them, though.
I don’t think you’ll end up with many accounts, to be honest. The three categories I’ve encountered on Lemmy so far are “normal”, “porn”, and “extremist”. Blocking lemmygrad seems to have gotten rid of most of the extremists and so far the porn accounts all seem to be isolates in their own little section of the Fediverse.
I’d think a normal person would maybe need a second account for browsing porn, but that’s it.
You’ll always be subject to other servers’ posting policies but when we’re talking about communities that just makes sense. You won’t be allowed to post hardcore porn in c/knitting even if the c/porn community doesn’t mind. Besides, communities exist on specific servers, so they should automatically follow the posting guidelines of the servers they’re on or risk getting deleted.
The only hairy issue I can think of is the fact that uploaded media automatically gets uploaded to your instance. That may confuse people.
Yeah, it was that last point that’s the sticking point. Like you I agree and would expect that when you post to a community you follow that communities guidelines, but since media apparently uploads to your instance not the instance hosting the community now you’re getting a 3rd party involved. If media was hosted on the same instance of the community I don’t think we’d have a problem and you wouldn’t need to worry about violating the posting guidelines of your home instance.
Personally, while I might create a “normal” account and a porn account, I definitely don’t want to feel like I have to do that. I think you should be able to create your account in any instance you want and post to any community you want (assuming said community isn’t on an instance which has had federation blocked from your home instance) without having to worry about the content rules of your home instance. I definitely think the embedded media handling needs to have a second look given to it.
As long as you’re staying aware of what you’re doing and your porn instance doesn’t break any laws (the Fediverse does have some defederated servers because of “loli” porn…) I think you could just get away with a single account, specifically one on the most permissive server. At least I don’t see why normal posts from lenny.xxx accounts would need to be blocked on other servers.
The real challenge is moderation. Porn servers often attract people who are not exactly model citizens and without strict and clear moderation, an instance can quickly become a cesspool. Once that happens, other servers start blocking that instance and your account on that server loses some of the benefits of the Fediverse.
With how expensive hosting is, I expect a lot of content to be hosted by third parties anyway. Imgur seems to be a popular choice.
You wouldn’t want instances to automatically store media posted from other servers, because that means that as a server admin you’ll have to deal with purging things like child porn from your server because some dickhead decided to cross post their trash to your community.
It should be noted that the content storage policy depends on your platform of choice, though. kbin and Mastodon will cache/mirror content from other servers into their local cache, for example.
Wouldn’t you need to moderate the contents of the community anyway? Does it fundamentally change things whether the cross posting is done via posting from a different instance or by the poster just switching accounts? In either case the post is ending up in the community and you still need to moderate it. Having media stored in your home instance just makes things really awkward because now as a user I have to contend with both the server wide rules of my home instance and the rules of the community I’m posting in. I just worry we’re going to see things fracture into two nearly completely separate fediverses, there will be the NSFW adult fediverse, and then the SFW fediverse and you won’t be able to subscribe to content from one on the other.
With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).