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.

  • DelvianSeek@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    Once again, thanks for all your time and effort keeping this instance going. And for being transparent about its workings and admin decision-making.

    I think a post like this would be good to have at least monthly, with ad-hoc posts more frequently as site changes dictate.

    I think a lot of the dead communities were created by folks fleeing from reddit and creating one for one placeholders for subreddits. Unfortunately, many of them have seen no activity and who knows if the creators are even around to mod them. If suggest a bulk email to those creators giving them 15 days to show some activity or the comm will be deleted (and follow thru).

    I’d volunteer to help with admin or moderation, but I don’t know rust, I’m not a developer in any way, shape, or form, and I have very little time. For now I think my contribution will have to be monetary only. Good luck finding someone though!

  • yimby@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    A good suggestion for a registration question: “Explain the meaning behind your username”, which I’ve already seen on a few instances. Not only is this one tough for a botter to program a response too, but it’ll do a good job of filtering the name_1234 style of botting that we saw a lot on the old site. Any human should be able to answer easily, bots not so much.

    • gavi@lemmynsfw.comOPM
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      1 year ago

      It was. I had a conversation with the community moderator, and concerns were expressed due to the legal grey area it falls under. The mod was not punished nor was in any kind of trouble. The deletion was amicable. I gave the moderator a go ahead previously while it was discussed with the team and while we were figuring out how to best navigate our rules. After a bit more consideration and talk with the team and looking deeper into emerging AI laws, we felt it was too much of a grey area to leave up.

      • Mikey Mongol @lemmynsfw.comM
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        1 year ago

        I’m going to add that the content on that comm almost certainly violates the deepfake ban that is going to get passed in the UK very soon, which carries a six month jail sentence. We do not want to mess around with that, so that combined with the general uncertainty over how the consent rule applies to it made it an easy call.

  • Nikolett Ingénue@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I’m really glad you guys are taking a stance against people who just report content creators with zero basis. It’s really sad how prevalent it is (on reddit at least) for people to enjoy NSFW content while still demonizing the creators who make it simply for trying to also have it help them financially in some way :(

    Haven’t had a chance to really explore this instance yet but feels really good and encouraging to see how seriously you seem to take moderating it in the most respectful and beneficial way possible for everyone involved ❤️

  • stockings_n_summer@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I bristle at the suggestion of having to get staff approval to create communities. Adds friction, and the time saved for staff on community cleanup may well be spent on community approvals.

    • b9999998@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      True, but at the same time, it may be preferable if you are to adopt some existing/abandoned community, rather than start a potential duplicate one.

      Also, volunteer to get onto existing communities - many would totally welcome additions. You could very well become top moderator if you are passionate about the community.

      There were/are many communities that have been abandoned by early adopters of lemmyNSFW that likely have moved on… Try to work with the admin team - they are a great bunch 😊

  • b9999998@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I don’t understand the benefit of “allowing NSFW without sign in or login”, can you elaborate more? The instance has very good strict rules about underage stuff but how are we ensuring that only adults are able to view NSFW?

    Wrt frequency, I would suggest weekly to start, until everything is settled down.

    Thanks again for keeping this instance alive and growing 👏👏👏

    • hemko@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You can’t really ensure minors from viewing the content. Only real way to do that would be verifying gov ID, which is not going to happen.

      Restricting nsfw for logged in users only is just annoyance, nothing else.

      • b9999998@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year ago

        I totally understand the situation with anonymous accounts and easy access by minors to all kinds of NSFW and porn sites, but shouldn’t at least some veneer of keeping kids out be put in place?

    • gavi@lemmynsfw.comOPM
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      1 year ago

      We will have a warning that pops up stating the site is for adults only and requiring you to click yes to access it.

    • baconboy@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      Age verification is difficult and no amount of logins will prevent underage users from gaining access if they are actively seeking to.

  • SecretNSFWAltAlpha@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    When viewing GIFs via the default web UI, a single-frame webp preview is shown instead which is specifed as an alternative source for the `` element. You need to click on it to go to the actual GIF, but that means following a link rather than just showing it in the feed. It would be better if it were either an animated webp, so genuinely an alternative source of the same content like the tag’s supposed to be used for, or was eliminated altogether.