If I’m able to provide any feedback, one area of concern for me was the lack of any good-faith attempt to negotiate intermediate solutions with affected users aside from of flat-out banning communities with little to no prior notice (which, IMO, should only occur as a last resort). This is pretty much one of the reasons why I left reddit (with respect to Apollo/spez).

While I understand that the moderation tools here are limited, it was not hard for me to find that the lemmy github has already implemented some features allowing communities to be hidden from local/all (it was implemented in 2022), and in my opinion, the presence of scat or bestiality isn’t so desperately urgent of an issue that it can’t wait 1-2 weeks for a patch to be made here. As far as I can tell, no one (and no other lemmy instances) was actually complaining about bestiality hentai until the admins chose to ban it here. To me, it looks as though the admin team is trying to aggressively fix issues that aren’t broken.

Does it really make sense to ban SFW artwork from here when it hasn’t been a problem?

Many of us here at lemmy ran communities on reddit, and we are experienced moderators. I can say personally that the amount of spam/illegal content that I’ve needed to deal with on c/HeteroHentai is magnitudes less than the content I dealt with on reddit. At the end of the day, perhaps it might be worthwhile to ask community moderators here if they feel like they are overloaded with illegal IRL content before taking preemptive measures to ban everything under the sun.

On most other spaces that I’ve been part of, there are many intermediate solutions and approaches that communities have taken short of banning the communities entirely. For example:

• Noncon/dubcon content must be clearly warned in the post title
• Noncon/dubcon content must go inside a spoiler (for here, you could say that the image must go inside the post body so it doesn’t show while scrolling)
• Fictional noncon/dubcon is allowed, but the community/post cannot promote or encourage noncon (IRL)
• Drawn noncon/dubcon is allowed, but realistic appearing artwork (or rendered 3D artwork) isn’t

There are many variations on these types of rules that I’ve seen in many places, and they’re are magnitudes better than simply banning scat/bestiality/etc without giving it a second thought. The lack of consideration given towards this issue and the apparent bias of the current admins to IRL NSFW content over drawn/fictional NSFW content is very discouraging.

Unfortunately, this is a bottom line for me, and I won’t be staying at LemmyNSFW (departure post).

Thanks for running this instance until now, and I wish you and your team the best.

This is certainly true, but I have a more pessimistic view that this type of fragmenting dooms this type of fediverse model from ever becoming mainstream. If every interest group splinters, eventually they’re all small enough that they lack the weight to build momentum, as well as the resources to sustain the community long-term. We can see this in the mastodon nsfw instances (a bunch of them shut down), and IMO that’s the inevitable fate of any small instance that lacks the numbers (read: financial support) to support a durable operation.

I think it’s absolutely valid to defederate if the users from a particular instance have a propensity to violate the content policy here.

For communication purposes, I think it’s important to clarify and emphasize that this is the case and it’s not done for political reasons. Maybe I’m overly paranoid, but I always feel as though this is a slippery slope (e.g. defederating from the socialist instance, or the trans/lgbt instance). Personally, for transparency’s sake, I think it’s better to avoid giving the impression that admins defederate from instances that they simply dislike. IMO, the defederation process should go by a process that is clearly defined and a published policies/rules.

IDK if this is a hot take, but personally I think the only reason to defederate should be for content policy.

Otherwise, it should be up to individual users to block communities that they don’t want to see.