[Announcement] Lemmy.ml has defederated from ani.social (and what this means for us) - AniSocial
ani.social
Please do not say anything hateful to the Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] admins or the developers. Before commenting on this thread, please read the post completely. — We (ani.social) have been defederated from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] a few hours ago presumably for the reason of being “full of CSAM” which I disagree. ## What happened? The Lemmy developers recently launched the new redesigned join-lemmy.org [https://join-lemmy.org] webpage which provides information about Lemmy and a list of servers that people can join. The redesign looks great! It details a lot of new and useful stuff such as a categorized server list and mobile apps. However, I noticed that our instance (ani.social) was not in the list despite previously being there before the redesign. After looking through the joinlemmy-site code [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site], I discovered that ani.social was added to the “excluded” list in a commit a few weeks ago [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/commit/d17c4d7d2fbeafb6e39000332d0ac21499de5b47]. I thought that this was a mistake so I made a pull request [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/266] to remove us from the excluded list (and also to add our instance’s category and language). Unfortunately, the pull request was closed with a comment that reads “No, that is full of CSAM”. The thread was locked so I couldn’t reply. I tried to reach out to the developers via Matrix, politely explaining that ani.social has a content policy rule against CSAM [https://ani.social/legal] which reads: > 7. Do not submit content depicting a child (both real and virtual) engaged or involved in explicit sexual activities. A child is defined as a person who is under 18 years old; or a person, regardless of age, who is presented, depicted or portrayed as under 18 years old. Unfortunately, my invitation was rejected and I did not hear back from them. Shortly after, I discovered that Lemmy.ml had defederated from ani.social [https://lemmy.ml/instances]. The last post ani.social received from Lemmy.ml [https://ani.social/post/861241] was just after the pull request was closed. ## What does this mean? This means that no user from ani.social can interact with communities from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] and vice versa. This affects those who subscribe to communities from that instance. This also affects the anime community on Lemmy as a whole because the biggest anime discussion community resides on Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] (!anime@lemmy.ml [/c/anime@lemmy.ml]) in which their episode discussion bot, @shinobu@ani.social, is hosted here. It’s very concerning that as an anime-themed instance, we’re now completely disconnected from this community and other related communities. This also affects ani.social in the long run as our exclusion from the join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org] webpage will reduce our visibility. The exclusion from join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org] and defederation from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] may also prompt other instance admins to defederate from us. Generally, ani.social will be seen in a very bad light. As the admin of ani.social, I genuinely feel heartbroken after what had happened. Not only do I feel like I’m doing a poor job of building ani.social but I also feel like I’ve disrespected the work of the Lemmy developers. I really apologize to those who are affected by this. I hope that this is just a misunderstanding and I will do my best to resolve this problem.

Those of you that have your account on lemmy.ml may want to consider moving to another instance if you still want to be able to access ani.social.

    •  ezchili   ( @ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi ) English
      22•8 months ago

      Typical

      A while ago something similar happened on Blahaj, where they defederated from lemmynsfw claiming it contained CSAM as well, because of… /c/adorableporn, which has nothing to do with anything under 18.

      I wish there was more backlash for idiotic defederations

      Also perhaps a way to have a ‘default instance blocklist’ as a defederation-light feature so users don’t have to create dozens of accounts until they find a host that doesn’t end up randomly defederating from the usual suspects like lemmynsfw and lemmygrad. They could just join any of them and find the issue in their account settings if they wish for an unfiltered lemmy experience.

  •  MentalEdge   ( @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz ) English
    20•8 months ago

    Welp, guess I’ll keep consolidating communities to ani.social, .ml is clearly a dangerous place for us weebs to be.

    reddthat.com has also been cool, and though I regret setting up !fitmoe@lemmy.world and !murdermoe@lemmy.world on .world now that ani.social exists, I’ve had no trouble there. The admins were perfectly willing to help me sort it out when I got fitmoe into an “unowned” state due to a bug back in version 17.

    I’m not sure the admins of .ml would have bothered based on what I’m seeing of their behaviour.

    Luckily the subcounts from .ml are fairly low, the breakdown for the communities I started is as follows:

    Even the largest community on ani.social, !animemes@ani.social only loses 7 subs from .ml. Still, with how little support there is for anime content on .ml, it’s scary to have communities like !anime@lemmy.ml(8.6k) and !animemes@lemmy.ml(2.7k) call it home. It’s difficult to check how many of the users subbed to these are actually ON .ml, tho. You’d have to add up the subcounts on all other instances with users that sub to them.

    •  wjs018   ( @wjs018@lemmy.ml ) English
      7•8 months ago

      Bot maintainer made a post over here.

      tl;dr is that the short term plan is to try to reverse the defederation. Longer term plan if that doesn’t work is probably to try to resume posting with a user on a different instance.

      The root of the problem is that the anime community on the lemmy-verse has more or less consolidated to this community for episode discussions. If you look at other instances, there is a huge drop off in activity when it comes to episode discussion communities compared to here. So, it would not make sense to try to move this community to another instance as that would pretty much destroy what has been built up here compared with just moving the host instance for the bot.

      •  recursive_recursion [they/them]   ( @recursive_recursion@programming.dev ) English
        12•8 months ago

        hope I’m not misinterpreting but wouldn’t staying on lemmy.ml only delay a potential recurrence of problems?

        cause what’s stopping the admins from nuking the anime community if they’ve already chosen to defed from ani.social?

        tbh to me it makes the most sense to migrate the community to ani.social as they were the community that was unreasonably impacted from this decision

        this kinda looks like a reddit situation again

        •  wjs018   ( @wjs018@lemmy.ml ) English
          8•8 months ago

          You’re not wrong and I think that is exactly what chaorace’s reply to me in that thread is worried about. Frankly this situation is really unfortunate and I don’t have a good answer.

          •  recursive_recursion [they/them]   ( @recursive_recursion@programming.dev ) English
            8•8 months ago

            Frankly this situation is really unfortunate and I don’t have a good answer.

            yeaa that’s totally fair, this shit sucks

            with weighing longterm pros vs cons personally I’d still try and convince the community to transfer over as:

            • the risk for staying on lemmy.ml seems too high
            • hitagi seems to be trying their best to fix this with no fault of their own
            • moving would send a message that fucking with communities with illogical reasoning would not be in the devs best interests
            •  ram   ( @ram@lemmy.ca ) English
              4•8 months ago

              Communities on the fediverse aren’t beholden to a single instance as well. If .ml admins can’t come to agreement to refederate, y’all should contact the shinobu bot dev to start including links to ani-social discussions on this instance, and petition mods of this community to do something to help that transition (what that is? I dunno).

              That said, I’m saying this having read these comments but not the og post. idk what the actual context to the conversation is, nor validity of the defederation, I’m just pro-democracy.

              I of course can’t speak on behalf of N3DSdude, but I’m in support of whatever the community wants to happen, happening. Just give us reason to believe it’s actually a significant portion of the community please