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Brace Yourselves
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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I suggested to PornHub that they should host their own lemmy instance for porn. It's stuck in limbo though awaiting mod approval.
Edit: I'm curious, I see I've gotten two downvotes, can someone who downvoted provide a reason why? Just anti-porn sentiment? Do you not want porn on lemmy? Don't like the company PornHub? Think it's a stupid idea for some reason? I'm serious, I'd like to know why you seem to disagree with the suggestion that PornHub should host a lemmy instance explicitly to post porn on. It's entirely possible I'm missing something here.
That is actually great idea, some organization hosting lemmy instance concerning their work.
Like Debian hosting free software lemmy communities, some marketing agency hosting design and creative communities. That way instances can ve snallee and manageable.
Of course it needs to get a bit more obvious how to use different instances.
Yeah that'd be smart on their part. They're already paying for the server space and the moderation team.
I have a (dumb) question that I'm not sure you can answer. So my home instance is lemmy.one, and say there's a porn instance. Porn isn't allowed on my instance, but I can interact with and post to other instances. So I post a picture to a community on the porn instance. Is that content hosted on my home instance (against the rules) or on the porn instance where it's allowed?
This is an excellent question that I've also had. I think (don't quote me on this) that it's hosted on whatever instance the community is based out of.
My understanding is that you've got essentially 3 different groups of things in lemmy. Users, communities, and posts/comments. Users are authenticated based on their home instance. Communities are stored on their home instance. Comments are stored in their associated community. When you post to a community on another instance, your post is transmitted to the other instance where it's stored. The reason (generally) that porn is banned on most lemmy instances is because the maintainer of that instance doesn't want the headache of having to moderate that content which is stored on their server. In the case of a federated instance though while the content might be cached on the server it isn't technically stored there so I don't think it runs into the same problems.
Now, what I don't know about, and someone who knows more about how the federation works hopefully does, is if the owner of an instance would ban federation with an instance hosting porn. Technically I think the owner of an instance can ban federation with any other instance, but I'm not sure they would go that far. I think it might depend on how good a job the other instance does of moderating their content. E.G. if as I suggested PornHub ran their own instance I don't think most instances would be opposed to federating with it because presumably PornHub already does a good job of policing NSFW content they host. On the other hand if you found some sketchy instance that was hosting lets call it legally dubious content, the instance owner might just ban federation with that instance, in which case I think it's communities would become inaccessible to you from your home instance. Of course you could make an account on that other instance and just sign in there, but that's kind of a PITA.
If your an expert on any of this and see somewhere I've got this wrong please correct me.
Yes, I've definitely wondered about this and then also how your subscriptions work. Are they associated with your account or can you have multiple accounts logged in on the Jerboa app and see all of those subscriptions at once? I haven't set up a second account yet to mess with that but am curious.
Subscriptions are tied to your account. You can have multiple accounts in Jerboa (even on multiple different instances) but each one is independent of the others. Anything your subscribed to in one is contained entirely in that one. You only see the subscriptions of the account you're currently signed in to. All your accounts are listed on a popout and you can click on each one to switch which account you're currently signed into. All your actions and everything you view are relative to the current account.
Exactly what I was wondering. Thanks!
This is great info, thank you!
So the other comment chain in this thread. While I was correct in general apparently I was wrong in the specific case of embedded media. If you upload an image that gets stored on your home instance, not on the instance the community belongs on which is highly relevant to this discussion. Currently what exactly is meant by an instances "no NSFW content" rule is kind of ambiguous. Does that mean no creating NSFW communities, no posting NSFW posts/comments to any local communities, no subscribing to NSFW communities, or no posting to NSFW communities anywhere.
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.
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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 host 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.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, I'm not sure there's a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took "no NSFW content" to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I'd now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren't any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it's a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don't want the headache of running a server, I'm annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that's terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
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I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There's only a couple people I've seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I've had to block, but I also understand that they aren't technically violating the rules of the server so there's nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I'm a strong believer in freedom of speech so I'm against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I'm interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I'd still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don't know, don't have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don't quite fit together right currently, but they're close.
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Just chiming in to thank both of you for that interesting discussion
Utahns are quaking rn