That is part of my idea. I don’t think it should be water-tight and not circumventable. My personal opinion is if a 16 yo really wants to watch porn or something, and they put in the effort to circumvent something that is a bit more elaborate than just clicking on “Yes” on a popup… They should be allowed to see it.

But that’s just my opinion. And I’m not really concerned with what other instances do. It’s enough if it enables me and a few other people to have my instance how I like and invite people to my instance without worrying too much. I mean my own server is also the only one I’m held responsible for. As far as I’m concerned other people can do what they like.

And it’s kind of pointless to try. Kids don’t need Lemmy or the Fediverse to watch adult content. They can just go to Pornhub and click yes. So I’m already in a position where I don’t care about other domains. But I’d like to keep my own Website and Minetest server clean. And also potentially offer some more services and at least do my best to do it right there.

That is kind of my point. I’d like to be able to do that. But Lemmy’s design /feature set prevents me from being able to do it.

define “weird” content…

NSFW is already off by default when you sign up to most instances

I don’t think this works in practice. Most big instances have gone the extra step to also defederate from the two major porn instances here. Showcasing that there are additional issues, otherwise they’d just have used this instead. I took a quick random sample of the biggest Lemmy instances and ~50-60% additionally block them entirely.

NSFW and 18+ aren’t the same thing. The NSFW tag is made for a slightly different purpose. And it’s a crutch that doesn’t work well for this purpose. There are some slightly vulgar topics that shouldn’t inadvertently pop up at your workplace but they might be safe to consume for minors. Also I think minors should have access to sex education. The Wikipedia has a similar stance. There are videos of “the act” on Wikimedia. You shouldn’t watch them while sitting in your open-plan office. But I think especially with the situation of sex ed in the USA, adolescents should get a chance to ask their questions and learn something about important aspects of life. The NSFW tag as is is doing them a disservice because now they can’t. Or everything else immediately gets mixed in. For example I’m not comfortable sharing my experiences >!sticking bluetooth-enabled things into somebody’s bum!< with kids. Or having sex ed and hardcore fetish stuff being the same category.

And I mean it’s not even just that. Gore and pictures of dead bodies in the Ukraine war also fall into the same category. So everyone just gets a yes/no decision on everything ranging from sex education to gore. In practice both these extremes aren’t very common on Lemmy. But in theory it’s just like that. (It’s not entirely theoretical. We just have a different community here. But there are examples in the wild. For example 4chan mixes pretty tame porn with fetish with crime, gore and death.)

So in summary the current state of (mis)using the NSFW tag actively leads to defederation and it’s doing a disservice to both people who participate in adult conversations and also adolescents. And its overly simplistic design prevents some conversations which should be allowed.

Why do you think porn is bad/unsuitable for 14-17 year olds?

My opinion doesn’t really count here. There are legal requirements people need to implement, whether they like it or not. So that’s kind of already the end of this conversation.

I think it makes a difference if you watch (somewhat tasteful) plain sex, or >!somebody dangling from a hook in the ceiling getting whipped by a disguised old man!<. I think it’s just not the same category. And we shouldn’t treat it as such. Similarly it’s also not the same if you deliberately explore that when you’re 17. Or you’re inadvertently exposed to it when 12 while researching what sex education has failed to provide you with.

And there’s the aspect of me inviting friends and family to my self-hosted services. Or discussing Linux server administration with people. I don’t want to mix either of that with porn. I think having it hidden per default is a good first step. And just requiring an extra, deliberate step to enable it is a good design. It just lacks any of the nuances to it, mingles valid use-cases with filtering that is made to do something else, and as I pointed out with the defederation happening, it comes with issues in practice.

And I think the Fediverse offers some important advantages over other platforms. ActivityPub is very vague. We can just attach fields to label content and the technical aspect is kind of simple to implement. And with federation, we have diversity built-in to the platform. This is our unique advantage. People have different use-cases, different moderation needs and perspectives and opinions on something like my proposal with the filtering. And I think the Fediverse turns out to be made exactly for something like this. I could have my instance my way and someone else can have a different opinion and have their instance another way.

But it requires some coordination effort. We need to agree on a foundation and some technical aspects. I don’t think a crazy rag rug works as a whole. And we already see some consequences of other disputes. Moderation being a constant issue in the background and instances seperating from each other because there’s no nuance to moderation and defederation. And ultimately we want to talk to each other and connect. And provide everyone with a place they like.

Thanks! At the time of writing, I wasn’t aware of the existence of piefed and sublinks. I read some of the Piefed blog posts today. Seems the author has some really good ideas how to address the shortcomings of the current approach. (Or what I view as shortcomings.) Splitting NSFW and NSFL is a really good start. Implementing better moderation tools is also a regularly requested feature. And judging by the other articles they mention, the project is closer aligned to my vision of a welcoming and inclusive platform. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it. Hope it approaches a usable state soon.

I guess I have my answer, here. I’ll wait until Piefed comes along and then use that. I’m somewhat optimistic about their claims. And if not, they included extensibility.

Sure. For me it’s the other way around. I’ve never really fell in love with microblogging. My hobbies are kind of mixed and sometimes niche, I sometimes don’t have anything of substance to post from my everyday-life and I really disliked the mob mentality and regularly surfacing toxicity in places like Twitter. And at some time I tried Reddit and got hooked. It’s a very different approach whether you follow people or topics/communities. It’s less about who you are, but more a marketplace of ideas. A level playing field. Sorted by ideas and hobbies and you can just dip in. It also makes you target different audiences for different niche hobbies. And everything gets ordered like that. I mean you also have hashtags on Mastodon, but it’s not really designed around this concept.

It really has some appeal to me. I also sometimes participate in web forums and found a similar structure in this. And I always liked how the free software community is supposed to work. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re 15 or a 40 yo woman… You just all come to the same place and discuss your ideas and perspective on things.

It does have downsides. And it doesn’t necessarily foster good behaviour and being nice to people. I don’t have an ultimate opinion on this. I think encouraging good behaviour in discussions, requires some degree of ‘it matters who you are’. Because having an image stick to you incentivizes you to behave properly. It’s not than big of an issue in practice, the overwhelming majority of people is nice and they use the platforms to everyone’s benefit and not to troll and cause trouble.

Thanks for your input. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I need to broaden my perspective. Have a closer look at other places in the Fediverse. I’m pretty sure Mastodon ain’t it for me. But Friendica might be a good place to start. I’ve also had Akkoma reccomended to me in this discussion. Maybe some other software than Lemmy is more closely aligned to my vision of what I’d like to run on my server. I’d like to stay compatible with Lemmy, since there are lots of nice people here and it’s usually fun to talk here, more so than in some other places.

Wouldn’t you find exactly the same stuff on porn websites ?

Yes. And i think it’s bad practice. We should strive to be better than the average porn site.

How would you do otherwise with preserving user privacy

I think there are two issues at play:

1. It’s a complex task. Usually that leads to people saying “we can never achieve 100%” and “it doesn’t fit every purpose” and then nothing gets done. I’d argue this gets us like 40% the way and that’s better than nothing. And it’d get me all the way and probably a few other people, too.

2. I think verification should be delegated to the instances. There isn’t a single solution. In some jurisdictions it might be enough that people claim to be 18. Those admins can choose a really simple solution. Other admins might not care or cater to minors, they can not activate the filters. A compromise might be requiring signup. That’d hide content from kids who aren’t logged in and just browsing the web. And already far better than just displaying it to them. What I’d like to do is have users request access and handle that manually. Alike some Discord servers or other software does. I know a few people I’d like to invite and their age. So it’d be no problem to unlock their accounts. I think it’s the same for other communities. And usually “eyeballing it” also works to some degree. It might be a valid approach for some admins. I know from experience you can often tell if your opponent in a computer game or the person you’re arguing with is a 13 year old kid, or 35. It’s not perfect but surely does a decent job with the extremes.

I’d like to abstain from privacy-breaching methods that are in use by big tech companies like Google etc. Requiring phone numbers on signup or showing your ID into the camera is too much. And it’s bad. I don’t want to tell the admins how to handle verification. If they’re required to, or would like to see the IDs and their users are comfortable with it… I’ve included extensibility to the requirements. So they can. Maybe we’re provided with a solution in the near future. My German ID card can already vouch for my age without revealing my identity. It’s a zero knowledge proof and the proper technical solution to age-verification. I can also envision some “Web of Trust” providing this. Something like PGP or CAcert does.

I think there are some valid ideas and some technical solutions are already out there and available. The issue is just nobody uses them. And neither do we.

Also, how do you avoid falling in the reddit trap where every discussion vaguely about sexuality end-up being 18+

That is a good question. These categories need to be concise. And the people ticking the boxed need to comprehend the meaning and consequence. I think moderators will do. With the users, I’m not sure. I don’t think I had that issue on Reddit. A year ago when I still was there, I’ve occasinally replied to people on relationship_advice and some more explicit subreddits. I didn’t see any problems. But I’ve not been a heavy user. Maybe I didn’t pay attention. I’ll listen if this is deemed a likely scenario or proves to happen in practice.