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.