[Announcement] Lemmy.ml has defederated from ani.social (and what this means for us)

Please do not say anything hateful to the 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 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 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, I discovered that ani.social was added to the “excluded” list in a commit a few weeks ago. I thought that this was a mistake so I made a pull request 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 which reads:

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. The last post ani.social received from Lemmy.ml 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 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 ([email protected]) in which their episode discussion bot, @[email protected], 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 webpage will reduce our visibility. The exclusion from join-lemmy.org and defederation from 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.