Lemmy NSFW

I was waiting for new versions, but the disk filled up faster than I expected. I'm moving 400GB image archive from local disk to object-storage. Unfortunately the process is very slow. It will take several hours.

Update: Migration finished 🎉

Hey yall, just wanted to chime in with a quick update on why we were down and have gone down a few times these past few days.

So... for those who don't know a bit on the backend way of how lemmy works right now, it's a lil more than a mess. Lemmy itself uses very little computing resources, you could probably run a decent instance on a toaster (I wouldn't suggest it though) but the problem that arises rapidly is the way photos are managed. The photo database downloads images both that are uploaded and federated. There is an option to disable caching for federated NSFW posts by unchecking enable NSFW within the instance admin panel. That's the only option related disabling federated images as of right now.

You see where I'm going with this, with this instance being as large as it is? Our photo database has been filling up pretty rapidly. We are attempting to troubleshoot solutions to prevent caching all federated content. Unfortunately as our backend team is attempting to figure that out, our pictures database just keeps ballooning more and more.

We have deleted some stuff in hopes to give more time, but we unfortunately have no choice but to migrate to object storage ASAP. Tomorrow there will likely be downtime as we migrate things over, and unfortunately there is no telling how long that will take.

Thank you for being patient and understanding while we navigate this. If you want to see updates to our status when we go down, check out our mastodon page here or come to our matrix public operations channel for updates (link in the sidebar.)

Things should work today though. Emphasis on should.

We are working on open collective still, but hosting this instance does cost money. If you are able to, donations are greatly appreciated. Especially as we will have to factor in object storage into our costs now.

Hi everyone! We are once again purging empty communities. It's happening in a day or two. Make an on-topic post in your empty comm if you want to have it not purged.

One of the admins at lemmy.blahaj.zone asked us to purge a community and all of its users because they thought it was full of child sexual abuse material, aka CSAM, fka kiddy porn. We assured them that we had checked this comm thoroughly and we were satisfied that all of the models on it were of age.

The admin then demanded we purge the comm because they mistook it for CSAM, and claimed that the entire point of the community was to make people think it was CSAM. We vehemently disagreed that that was in fact the point of the community, but they decided to defederate from us anyway. That is of course their choice, but we will not purge our communities or users because someone else makes a mistake of fact, and then lays the responsibility for their mistake at our feet.

If someone made a community intended to fool people into thinking it was kiddy porn, that would be a real problem. If someone of age goes online and pretends -- not roleplays, but pretends with intent to deceive -- to be a child and makes porn, that is a real problem. Nobody here is doing that.

One of the reasons we run our instance the way that we do is that we want it to be inclusive. We don't body shame, and we believe that all adults have a right to sexual expression. That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes adults that look younger than some people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after. There's no way to draw a line that says "you can't like adult people that look like X" without crossing a line that we will not cross.

EDIT: OK, closing this post to new comments. Everything that needs saying has been said. Link to my convo with the blahaj admin here.

Hi all! Mikey here, one of your fearless admins. We've had so many new users lately that I wanted to bid you all welcome! Have a look around. You'll need an account to see the nsfw content, which is most of it. Feel free to sign up for one -- we rarely go more than a few hours, maybe a day at most, without zeroing the application queue.

We like new people and we strongly encourage to you participate, not just lurk! But before you do, please check the rules in the right-hand sidebar of the main page (or here) and also give the ol' FAQ a quick clickeroonie: https://docs.lemmynsfw.com/docs/faq/.

Our purpose is to be a safe, friendly place for NSFW "research" on the Fediverse . I know a lot of you are coming over from reddit and so I would like to stress that despite superficial similarities, we are not reddit and we don't want to be reddit. The vibe around here is different and some things that were common over there are not acceptable around here. Please make note of our content restrictions. We are especially picky about respect and consent, and we take our sourcing policy seriously.

Things are still pretty new around here and there are a lot of rough edges, so we hope you'll try to bear with us. Lemmy isn't fully featured yet, so running a Lemmy instance, let alone an NSFW instance, is kind of like trying to build a plane while it's already in the air.

If you have any new user questions you can comment here, post in c/asklemmynsfw, or if you use matrix, there's a public operations page: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org (what Lemmy is to Reddit and Mastodon is to Twitter, matrix is to Slack or Discord). You can also message me or another admin, but matrix will probably get you a faster reply.

Thanks everyone! Welcome once again, and I hope to see you around.

Hey yall and happy Friday! (Or Saturday... depending on where you are).

I was just wanting to pop on here with a condensed list of some announcements of things we are working out, goings on within the community and the lemmyverse, and just generally have a place for any questions, bug reports, or chat within the instance. Unsure what the frequency of these announcements will be, but if I need to make more I will.

How often do you want to see these kinds of threads? Also, I will be responding to this thread all weekend.

Anyway, below is a list of announcements and shiz. Lets get into it!

Addressing Bots

Unfortunately, we had really not much of a choice but to enable application only registration currently. There was a large influx of spam bots, which does suck but we are approving them as fast as we can. It's likely this will stay, but we will reassess this as Lemmy improves. Currently the question is "why do you want to join this instance" which is a little vague, but unsure what else to change it. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

With that being said, our backend team is working on adding a NSFW yes/no dialogue and allowing NSFW without having to sign up or login. No ETA on when that will happen, but it's a heavy consideration and was discussed prior to this decision.

Federation Woes

It goes without saying, Lemmy is a little more than barebones right now. Your patience really is appreciated. Our backend team is figuring shit out now to really dive into how to address our needs as an instance and troubleshoot with other instances stuff regarding federation and the current limitations of Lemmy right now. I and some other admins are actively in contact with some other large instances. Coordinating actively with other instance admins has helped quite a bit in making things run generally smoothly.

Right now, we really need to make sure that we are tagging NSFW. People have mostly been good about it, but if you see anything untagged as NSFW please report it. There is question how well edited NSFW tags are being federated, so if you accidentally post something without an NSFW tag consider removing it and reposting it with a NSFW tag instead just out of courtesy for potential federation concerns.

We suspect some apps aren't blurring NSFW posts properly either for those on other instances.

Image Uploading

It should be noted that it is preferable that those posting images into our community are doing so with a lemmynsfw account. It makes managing content easier and has the potential to save headache with other instances. There are quite a few instances who do federate with us but do not feel comfortable hosting NSFW images on their servers, and I ask you to please be mindful of that. That's not to say you have to be on lemmynsfw to participate here though! You can comment, upvote, etc etc. Just consider if you are posting images either using off site hosting or posting from our instance.

This is not a steadfast rule currently, but that may change in the future and concerns as to when we are actively considering that will be made clear in advance.

Open Collective

Right now, we are still finding a potential fiscal host for open collective. We’ll update you all once we have more to share.

Content Creators & Trolling

Per this thread we have established our respect of content creators on our instance. Do not report content creators/onlyfans models as spam unless they are in a community that explicitly prohibits it or are truly posting spam. Also, don't harass content creators. Seriously, be nice.

It goes without saying here though, if you see a comment or post harassing anyone please report it. If a moderator of a community is failing to address it, contact an admin directly. Right now, there is no way to directly report to site staff specifically, it goes into the mod queue and site staff see the entire mod queue.

With that being said, if you are a moderator and are seeing harassing posts as well or feel they are breaking site wide rules, you can delete the reported post and simply not file it as resolved so admins can see it. It is preferable you do this and then/or message an admin.

Community Stuff & (Potentially) Proposed Changes

As of right now, there is quite a lot of communities that exist within a few varying categories with some overlapping. Some are empty inactive communities, communities without active mods that have any report sent to admins directly, and communities with mods that are active but are still having a large volume of reports, and generally redundant empty communities.

We are discussing the potential of making communities by site staff approval preferably so that if a comm already exists people can be directed to it. We are curious about this as a potential, any thoughts?

We will be purging empty comms, as well as allowing some to be "adopted", and discuss with mods of communities that are having a large report queue or just simply a large number of subscribers that they should get more mods on their team.

If you are a community moderator, please ask to join our matrix mod coord chat.

New Staff, maybe?

We are still figuring out the potential of adding more members to our team. We do need more content admins, potentially in varying time zones. We are cautious due to the limits of Lemmy of adding new admins though. There are some people in consideration, so if you've discussed such with myself don't worry you'll be contacted in time about it even if you miss staff applications if there are any. If we do proceed with staff applications, an announcement will be made.

Also, having potentially someone who is bit more familiar with rust might be helpful for our backend team as well.

Updated Rules Are Live

We updated our rules a few days or so ago after posting them and taking into account feedback. The sidebar serves as a condensed version of the rules, whereas docs.lemmynsfw.com will serve as a means of elaborating for those who want to know more in-depth details behind the "why and how" or are community moderators/site staff and want to know more about the basis of what our rule enforcement expectations actually are for the instance.

Our docs page is under construction, so what you see beyond the FAQ is still being built. We will update when new pages are live though. As a reminder, these pages aren't rule changes but rather serve as an in-depth look beyond the condensed rules on the sidebar.

Hi all! Apparently there are a couple of Lemmy apps now where the "report" button is right next to the "share" button, and so we've been getting inundated with a bunch of reports that aren't actually real. One of those apps defaults to putting no text in the box where you're supposed to put in the reason for reporting, and the other one defaults to "Spam or Abuse".

We don't have the resources to go chasing down all bajillionty-twelve of those reports we're getting on the off chance that one or two may be real, so for the time being any report with either nothing or "Spam or Abuse" in the subject line will be swept into the circular file, unless we can tell just by looking at the post and not clicking anything (no nsfw tag, obvious off-topic spam) that it's a bad post.

Thanks!

The docs site is still under construction, so expect it to change and more pages to be added and it to improve progressively.

I saw Lemmy.world has self deployed the Voyager (formerly wefwef) app and it made a lot of sense! That's why I felt the shameless need to copy. It seems to be a nice experience even on the computer as well. Also NSFW content is not blurred as expected! Give it a try.

voyager.lemmynsfw.com

Thank you for your patience yall. It seems our mitigation efforts worked and we were likely never in danger. If you are concerned about other accounts on affected instances, it is unlikely your personal data was breached. Keep a look out for more info on those instances though as they will likely explain things more.

We have little information currently, but we may at least lock the site down for preemptive safety reasons. There seems to be a serious XSS vulnerability within lemmys code. We have disabled community creation temporarily and are contemplating taking the site down temporarily as well. Please find us below and stay safe, ya'll.

https://mastodon.world/@lemmynsfw https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org

EDIT: For the time being we have disabled federation, new user sign ups, and community creation.

We quietly defederated temporarily earlier because lemmy.world seemed to be compromised earlier in some way, but then it was fixed. Now it's happened again. Unsure what is going on over there but there isn't much use speculating. They have been dealing with weird redirects to shock sites like lemonparty (throwback). Whoever has compromised them seems to have some early 2010s internet sense of humor I guess.

Anyway, once they have things under control and an announcement is made we will refederate ASAP. For the time being, please avoid going to their homepage for the time being as we have no idea what the nature of the compromise of their site is and to what extent.

EDIT: seems lemmy.blahaj.zone just was as well. :(

Please stop reporting all OF models as spam. If a post is off-topic, report is as off-topic. If community rules forbid OF models from posting, report that. If a user is flooding a sub with multiple posts a day in a row, that's a legit report as well.

Otherwise a post by an OF model is not in and of itself spam, even if it is made by a female with the temerity to control her own sexuality.

Hi all! As promised, here is the proposed text of the newest version of the rules. The staff has gone through like eight drafts and literally thousands and thousands of matrix posts to get here, so please be kind. You can see @limeey's comment on the transparency post if you want more insight into how this sausage was made.

We are opening these rules to commentary from the community before they go into effect. To be clear, this isn't a vote, but we will take all community feedback into account and answer whatever questions we can before finalizing anything.

Please keep in mind that we are not Reddit, we do not have Reddit's resources, and safety and consent are our priorities.

I'll post the draft in two parts in two comments: The new sidebar, and the FAQ/clarifications page.

An ex-admin to whom we have given access to the server, has reported us to the server provider. Also we were already planning to migrate somewhere else. So right now we're moving to a more secure server.

I'll try to make a smooth transition. Any interaction (post, comment, like etc.) after 11AM (CET) will be deleted, but the site will not be down during migration. It will be an estimated 1 hour process.

Update: its done. Hopefully without problems. If you see this, you are on the new server.

When this instance first started, I don't think it was fully anticipated how large it would get. The place where this instance was when I first stepped up as admin was wholly unsustainable long term. There was little direction as to what the instance's intentions as a website were, and the specific intentions it seemed to lean towards (being a sort of reddit 2.0) is not something we have the ability to handle. Neither monetarily nor legally.

The expectations that this instance specifically would be replacing reddit nsfw content entirely is not realistic, and the expectations that have been had for what all of lemmy is capable of has been much higher than what the backend side of things is at right now. Rome was not built in a day, and the same is true for communities of this nature. We are utilizing a platform based on a philosophy that hasn't been widely used outside of email since the early Internet, while now having to work the laws and limitations that the current Internet now presents as well. It's an experiment, and just like all other communities we have made mistakes and are trying our best while figuring this out together. This is not a business, we are not shareholders, we are simply passionate volunteers.

Right now, our team has been paying attention to concerns and feedback that have been raised. We are currently actively engaged in a discussion of what the next steps are from here. My hasty implementation of the current restrictive content policy was not something to do long term but an attempt to reign in a community with what felt to have little restrictions and many issues popping up. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of managing a community like this. The current policy as it stands right now, has been a band aid while we discuss further how to move forward. And we have been.

And thankfully we have a much bigger back-end team than before. What has helped the most to provide insight is that we have a back-end team member who has active experience in hosting adult websites within the legal span of the law. We also have backend team members who are helping to build mod tools not just for lemmyNSFW but with active collaboration with others across instances as well.

As we have discussed rule changes and throwing things at the wall, our biggest aspect has been determining if we are on the same page as a team. Unfortunately, a now previous back-end team member decided that he was not. And that's ok. However last night, instead of moving forward and deciding that our ethos as a team moving forward isn't for them there was a post that was made that compiled our original rough draft for new content guidelines and attempted to pass them off as that is going to be our full go to as a community. It isn't. We are discussing things and hashing things out as a team still but have made significant progress moving beyond what was discussed. When changes occur, we will make a post clarifying such changes. We ask for patience, please.

About a quarter of the communities here have 0 posts in them. We're going to start pruning the 0-post comms in the next couple of days. If you have a comm with 0 posts that you want to keep alive, please make an on-topic post in it. Otherwise you're going to lose it.

We are going to prune some empty comms, or comms that are very low traffic that are redundant with high traffic. These comms are going bye-bye:

~~https://lemmynsfw.com/c/verify

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/verified

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/nudes

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/nude

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/cumcoveredfucking

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/butthole

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/duskydelights

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/hairy

https://lemmynsfw.com/c/vagina~~

Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.

I know there's been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it's been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.

Here's a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.

For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.

Also, there's another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.

If you are tagged by an admin in the comments to this post please check in to ensure that you're still active and willing to be a moderator.

The downtime was brief like we hoped, everything seems to be working fine.

@[email protected] just informed me of such, please be aware. If all goes it'll be around 5 minutes or so. We have a mastodon account as well to provide updates, so be sure to check here or visit our matrix room if things seem to be taking a bit longer than that.

It can't really be fully predicted how intense the migration, but we are expecting quite a bit.. if previous platforms (especially twitter) are any trend to look towards, expect traffic to intensify a bit. Probably even more than it already has.

For those coming from reddit Please bear with us as well, as well as the rest of the lemmyverse. If you're new to lemmy and the fediverse as platform, you may be confused as how to best find communities right now. lemmyverse.net/communities is a good start, make sure to tick the NSFW community display option. Welcome to the community, and bear with us due to the limitations lemmy currently has as a platform. Things are improving, but for the time being our current content policy is quite strict. It is temporary, and will be elaborated more so in the future as lemmys mod tools improve. There will be a link added to the sidebar that provides info as to why this is.

Be mindful of making sure your NSFW posts are properly tagged as well.

Both host content that are against our content policy and have had issues with users from those sites entering our community crossposting content that violates our content policy. We are discussing defederating other instances as well. There is discussion of lemmit.online being defederated because it pretty much exclusively scrapes reddit content and reposts it, and some content creators have expressed discomfort. If there's other instances that might be worth considering defederating from, just post and it'll be added to the current discussion.

and before anyone brings it up, lemmygrad defederated with us.

This isn't a dictatorship but I ask that you please behave in the comment section and at least try to understand why we are defederating.

Hey yall! It's gavi here! It's been quite a whirlwind over these past few weeks. Yesterday our lovely @yay made a post in regard to wanting to take a step away from lemmynsfw, and there was a lot of confusion from that post so I'm here now to talk about some of things that have occurred behind the scenes.

Who is hosting now?

Right now, our team is expanding and changing. @yay will still be doing primary hosting, but we now have more back-end admins and a more carefully coordinated backend team spread across time zones. We are discussing migrating the server, as well as other things. When any changes are expected to occur, an announcement will be made. This will not a profit-based project, so bear with us here.

What about the content policy? Is scat banned, whats the deal?

Right now, as lemmy expands, we will be having a temporary pause on specific niche content that may potentially risk our instance being defederated. This is not permanent, and we have no personal qualms with such content, but we need to make this choice until mod tools improve and make sure that we aren't flooding /all with stuff that might cause issues for other instances.

The following content has a temporary pause and we will review such as lemmy evolves and improves. The removal of these communities are not permanent.

Hot lunch, blood, scat

The following content however will not be welcome on our instance, no matter if mod tools improve.

noncon, depictions of underage content drawn or otherwise (Loli/Shota/Cub/Etc), deepfakes & revenge porn (elaboration will be expanded in upcoming content policy updates.), snuff, beastiality

Furry content is not banned and furries are welcome here provided they follow the content policy as outlined above. That said, if you are posting furry content, consider posting it on a specifically furry instance as they more equipped to moderate that content than we are at this time.

Generally, we are discussing improving our content policy, and will provide a thread elaborating further upon existing policies and allowing discussion and feedback in a separate thread in the near future. Keep a look out.

Current staff situation

I have been made the lead admin for the site. We are trying to figure out a feasible situation for staffing to prevent burn out and evenly distribute content administration across time zones. We will likely be having staff apps in the future, so if that is something you would be interested in keep an eye out for that. Right now, our biggest thing is working with the limited mod tools we have. It's really a matter of trial and error and having a more carefully coordinate staff leadership is something that would be beneficial for the site at large.

Federated And Defederated Instances

As some have already seen, some instances have defederated from us. That is fully their right to if they want to disengage from NSFW content entirely. However, if the defederation was due to a concern or issue outside of that within our instance, we would like to discuss the matter and at least make a fair attempt to address their concerns. Our desire moving forward is to establish communication with instance admins to address concerns that may be popping up, as well as just generally creating an open line of communication and encouraging feedback from them and their community at large. There will likely be a public matrix community created for the site as well that will foster technical discussions of the site only, such as sharing downtime, development, etc. I will personally be attempting to reach out to larger instance admins. With that being said, if there is any instance admin that see this and would be interested in reaching out please do not hesitate to. My matrix address is within my profile.

We are currently discussing defederating instances that may put some of our communities at risk or violate our own content policies, and if that occurs that will be announced promptly.

NSFW Tagging

Right now, we are investigating some way to completely designate the entire instance with nsfw tags by default and ways to more properly blur community icons, but there are hurdles and limits to the current nsfw tagging system within lemmy. With that being said, admins and mods cannot tag nsfw content that isn't properly tagged, and some lemmy apps are particularly finnicky with nsfw tags. It's a pain in the ass, but we REALLY need to be making sure our content properly tagged so that it doesn't pop up in federated instances as untagged nsfw content. There will likely be a crackdown on said posts that are not tagged properly, so please be aware of this fact and triple check that your posts are properly tagged. I am sorry for the impending hardass attitude from myself on the matter, but this is really critical to maintaining good will with other instances that decide to federate NSFW content.

Update: I contacted with current big owners, other older friends and lastly from some friends from here. Mostly all of them living in US so they don’t want/can’t host it. So I’ll keep hosting without being on moderation side. @[email protected] will post about details I guess. @[email protected] is the new top admin.

As you know, it has been 2 weeks since I opened the instance and it has grown quite a lot. Likewise, the time I have to devote to this work has increased a lot.

I'm dealing with lemmynsfw more than my IRL job right now :D This is bothering me. Also, having an NSFW instance instead of a normal instance makes things much more difficult. If you remember; I had my biggest scale fuck up with the post "we allow loli content" :) This situation wore me out. Also a lot of problems are bothering me, both as a software and as a community.

That's why I'm thinking of transferring the instance and the domain to a person I trust. Who can maintain the deployments and also know this stuff. I will also roll over any donations made, excluding the current month's expenses.

I'm sorry if I've upset anyone. That's all from me.