I didn’t expect to be making this post so soon (I’ve only been here one week), but I’ve ultimately decided over the past few days that LemmyNSFW’s current management and content policy isn’t compatible with my personal values.

I’ll be moving to: https://www.pillowfort.social/community/Heterohentai

Pillowfort is kind of like tumblr but it also has communities that you can post stuff to (like reddit). It’s NSFW content policy is more similar to reddit/twitter/pretty much every major NSFW website, and it’s user-funded/non-commercial. Registering is unfortunately not super straightforward (they have a “rolling waitlist”; for me it took 15 minutes to get a registration link).

I’ll be giving Pillowfort a try on the next step of my (gradual) migration away from reddit. Pillowfort has been around for several years now, so at the very least it’s more stable than a lot of the brand-new things popping up now.

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Why am I leaving?

I have very strong values/opinions, and I think intolerance/prejudice/kinkshaming towards non-mainstream sexual interest groups is unacceptable. I can’t support site-wide bans on fictional depictions of bestiality, scat, noncon/dubcon, and I will resolutely leave spaces that make those kinds of policy decisions.

As it currently stands, LemmyNSFW has the strictest content policy out of almost every single NSFW website currently online on the internet. Some admins have purported that these bans are for legal purposes, however my own personal impression from my interactions with some admins over the past few days is that the motivation for these content bans is moralistic/populistic rather than grounded in legitimate legal concerns.

I can’t begin to explain how hurtful it is to be in environments where other people judge you for your fetishes. On the Internet, I consider myself to be a fairly rare minority (a straight woman who posts hentai), and I have a long history of going through spaces where users are attacked for liking something that mainstream people consider to be “immoral”. While it may not be apparent from the artwork that I post here, I do have a noncon/dubcon fetish (from the victim’s perspective), and it’s probably around 50% of the NSFW content that I consume on the internet as a whole.

Myself aside (I’m not an isolated example, after all), there are many examples of how this kind of moralistic paternalism is harmful. Do we really think that we’re helping anyone by running around and shouting at people that they’re immoral for looking a pictures of pokemon having sex? Are we helping prostitutes by banning prostitution (for immorality) and driving them to less safe and less regulated spaces?

There seems to be an unspoken implication that: “People who read fictional noncon erotica must be predisposed to becoming rapists, therefore we should ban noncon erotica” – but really there isn’t any concrete evidence that this is the case, otherwise violent video games with machine guns would have been banned ages ago.

The negativity here over the past few days has really been unbearable. Every day, it feels like there’s discussion about banning something new, or pointing the pitchfork at something else. LemmyNSFW feels like it is possibly one of the most intolerant NSFW communities that I’ve been on in the internet in recent memory, and it operates under a guise of moralistic paternalism, which is honestly leaves me feeling very sour.

We’re all adults here. I don’t need anyone to tell me that I can’t read (or it’s immoral to read) (or even worse, the bullshit claim that it’s illegal to read/write/draw/post) fictional hardcore BDSM erotica that contains slavery/noncon/etc.

Naturally, if this place thinks that appealing to lemmy.world (the federation of SFW lemmy instances that have threatened to defederate) is more important than appealing to their own users… first of all, that logic makes absolutely no sense. Since when does a country prioritize the opinion/approval of overseas foreigners over the interests of their own citizens?

The reality is that banning communities, even “temporarily”, utterly destroys the trust that affected users have. To use an analogy, it is 100% unacceptable for an LGBT community to “temporarily” ban their transgender members. What kind of message does that even send? Do you think they would really want to come back? Even threatening a ban destroys the trust, and it damages the integrity of a community to a far greater extent than I think the admins may realize.

Basically, I’ve decided that it’s not worth my energy to invest my time here, particularly as this instance conflicts fairly strongly with my personal values. It’s absolutely within the admin/owners’ powers to create arbitrary rules and policies that they want, and likewise I’ll come and go to the spaces online with my own feet.

Thank you to everyone who commented here during this short period of time, and I apologize for the rant (it’s not particularly on-topic for c/HeteroHentai). Maybe we’ll see each other somewhere else on the Internet in the distant future.

-xy