I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Lemmy is a fantastic Reddit clone, and federation is great for persistence, but it completely lacks nuance in how content is delivered. Defederation is only going to further fragment the platform. No one is going to be totally happy with it until the onus is primarily on the individual, rather than the community or instance.

As a user, I want choice. Give me settings. Give me more control. Then if I see something I don’t like, or something I’d rather change, that’s on me. That sounds much better than hoping and waiting for a level-headed admin to figure it out for me, or making yet another account when they get it wrong.

We’ll never get anywhere if all the admins are afraid of getting on everyone else’s “bad side” for content they can barely control themselves.

Well said. I knew that something like this would happen eventually. I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner tbh.

I just hope that proper warnings will be given to people in the future (rather than the banhammer being used as a first resort) and that this doesn’t have too much of a chilling effect on expression going forward. I consider myself a pretty open-minded fellow, but even I have my limits.

Yeah, I vehemently disagree with some of the opinions expressed in that thread once it started going in a different direction. But I still think there is some value in sparking a good faith debate on such difficult subjects. I hope that this place can still respectfully discuss unpopular opinions like that in the future without being too heavy handed moderation-wise.

Might be overthinking this. The instance rules already don’t allow most IRL content and anything that looks underage, so that more controversial stuff is not even an issue here and it might be a little redundant to make another rule about it. Probably the most edgy thing that’s left to worry about are drawings of zoo/beast stuff, which you could probably exclude just on the basis that it’s off-topic or no longer considered “furry”.

Edit: If things ever get too confusing, I always bring it back to the fantasy vs. reality standard. It’s one of the few principles I’ve found that holds up to scrutiny and helps moderators maintain their sanity. Otherwise it’s way too easy to justify or rationalize any number of reasons why a particular kink is right or wrong, and it usually devolves into how the individual feels in the moment.

While I’m still of the opinion that most fictional content is pretty much harmless and I’d prefer to include more content rather than exclude, after some of the wild takes and tangents I was seeing the other day, maybe it is wise to pump the brakes a little bit. Seems sensible for this community for now at least.

I get that a lot of furry stuff isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Yeah, I’ve seen some pretty weird fetishes over the years that I don’t really understand the appeal of. But I’m actually kind of surprised this is even an issue that people are worried about, at least to a degree that is worth mentioning. This stuff seems quite tame in comparison to some of the early internet forums of old. And at the end of the day, this is all fictional. If the ones viewing it are mature adults, it hurts literally no one. The drawings don’t have feelings.

It’s clear that lemmy still has some major work to do yet on this front. The fact that you have to visit the community first in order to block it seems like quite a flaw. And there is no way, to my knowledge, to deemphasize some content on the front-end without basically purging it completely. Not exactly ideal solutions for those that don’t want to be blasted by scat or gore, but also don’t want to live exclusively in their subscribed tab.

I understand the sentiment of trying to build a more positive oriented community by getting rid of something like downvotes. However, that feels almost exactly like what Youtube did in removing dislikes on their site, which was widely unpopular. It’s a great indicator of spam or other undesirable content and removing it altogether might be doing more harm than good.

Plus, if filtering becomes a thing, being able to, for example, ignore posts with less than 5 upvotes would do wonders for some browsing once the site gains more traffic.

That said, I will always advocate for options. If that became a setting in a menu somewhere, I think that could be the best of both worlds.