I run a mastodon instance with some friends, and a single user misskey instance for myself because I like it better than mastodon. It’s its own thing, it’s been around since 2014 and it’s very robust and stable. I love being able to format posts, easily customize the instance and write more than 500 characters.

I’m personally not a huge fan of firefish but it also works pretty well and has many of the same features as misskey.

What do you mean I don’t host it like mastodon would? Are you talking about the “official” mastodon instance, mastodon.social? Because they do exactly what I described above, and you’d have known if you’d just checked https://mastodon.social/about before posting. Just click “moderated servers”. See all the “inappropriate content” that’s listed there? Most of those allow lolicon/shotacon (as evidenced by their defederation of pawoo). It is standard practice, and whether or not you agree is completely irrelevant. That’s how most instances are run, period, except for the free speech absolutists who are also defederated by everyone else for allowing bigotry/propaganda/lolicon and so on.

I know that there’s a tradition of confidently posting on reddit about something you don’t know anything about and acting like your opinion on the subject you know nothing about is Very Important, but this ain’t reddit.

I can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny or not but I’ll answer anyway.

There’s a difference between federating with instances that disallow any pornography featuring models/characters/etc who look underage, and federating with instances that allow that type of material. Actual CSAM will be immediately obvious and handled very quickly on the first, but not necessarily on the latter instance.

It’s pretty much standard practice for Mastodon/*key/whatever admins to defederate instances that allow lolicon/shotacon and anything else like that. There are curated block lists out there and everything, we’ve been doing it for years while still federating and we’re doing just fine.

The problem is that if it’s hard to tell at a glance, there’s no way to know if actual CSAM gets uploaded there in the future. So what it boils down to is, is it worth the risk? That admin says no, it isn’t, so they defederate.

My Mastodon instance defederates pretty much any instance that allows sexually explicit or suggestive artwork or photos of people who look underage. It’s just not worth it.

Well yeah I’m not like defending them or anything. I just kind of understand where they’re coming from too.

First of all I want to make it clear that I don’t agree with this defederation, if the models are verified adults then there is no problem.

That said, as a Mastodon instance admin, I wanna explain something to y’all. CSAM is one of those things that you do not want to take your chances with as an admin. Beyond the obvious fact that it’s vile, even having that shit cached on your server can potentially lead to very serious legal trouble. I can see how an admin might choose to defederate because even if right now all models are verified, what if something slips through the cracks (pun not intended, but I’ll roll with it).

My instance defederates a bunch of Japanese artist instances like pawoo because of this. All it takes is one user crossing the line, one AI generated image that looks too real.

Aside from all that, there’s also a lot of pressure being put on many instance admins to outright ban users and defederate instances that post or allow loli/shota artwork as well. You’re quickly labeled a pedophile if you don’t do it. A lot of people consider fake CSAM to be just as bad, so it’s possible that the other admin felt that way.

I’m more lenient on loli/shota as long as it’s not realistic because I understand that it’s a cultural difference and generally speaking Japanese people don’t see it the way we do. I don’t ban stuff just because I think it’s gross, I just don’t look at it.

Anyway what I’m trying to say I guess is that being an admin is hard and there’s a lot of stuff y’all don’t know about so disagree with that person if you want (I do too) but keep in mind that these decisions don’t come easy and nobody likes to defederate.

EDIT: here’s a mastodon thread about the CSAM problem in the fediverse if you’d like to learn more.

Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<

The creator of Mastodon went to some kind of Meta round table meeting (couldn’t find the original thread, here’s someone declining the offer), so it’s entirely possible that he was told a bunch of lies and believed them.

That said, Meta is going to pay the admins of whatever instances Threads decides to federate with, and they’ve said that’ll be the biggest instances, which… well, that’s mastodon.social, by far the biggest Mastodon instance. So, I don’t know. I don’t have any reason to believe that he’s a bad person, but what kind of money are we talking about here? No one is immune to that kind of temptation.

I dunno, this whole situation has a weird vibe.