As of November 7, 2023 09:23 both Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com have federated with us again. Thank you for quickly reviewing the situation and reversing your decision.

We hope that Lemmy.ml will follow soon.

::: spoiler Original post:

To anyone who is not familiar with the situation, please read our previous post for context.

Please do not say anything hateful toward the concerned instances' admins.

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What happened?

A few hours ago, Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com has defederated from ani.social, following the events of Lemmy.ml defederating from ani.social on November 3.

Lemmy.World has given a censure on Fediseer with the reason being "loli". lemmy.dbzer0.com has not given a reason for defederation as of the moment.

We disagree with anyone claiming that ani.social intentionally and knowingly hosts CSAM. We would like to remind everyone that ani.social has a content policy regarding CSAM content since day one. Specifically, our content policy states the following:

7. 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.

To provide some context, the Lemmy developers excluded ani.social from the recently launched join-lemmy.org redesign without any clear reason provided. My pull request to remove ani.social from the exclude-list was denied for the reason being that ani.social is "full of CSAM". Shortly after, ani.social was defederated from Lemmy.ml. The full story may be found on the previous thread.

Numerous threads have since spawned, many of which have comments state that there is no evidence of the claim that ani.social is "full of CSAM" and that the decision was unfair. These threads include:

• https://ani.social/post/863176
• https://lemmy.ml/post/7406051
• https://lemmy.world/post/7714824
• https://sh.itjust.works/post/8411770
• https://lemmy.ml/post/7437529

We respectfully ask the admins of Lemmy.World, lemmy.dbzer0.com, and Lemmy.ml to review the situation and our policies, and consider reversing your decision if there is no evidence that ani.social intentionally and knowingly hosts CSAM.

What now?

If you are a user of ani.social and wish to see content from Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com, we kindly ask you to move to a different instance that is federated with all three instances.

If you are a user of Lemmy.World or lemmy.dbzer0.com and wish to see content from ani.social, we kindly ask you to send a request to your respective admins to reverse their decisions after reviewing the situation.

To all other Fediverse instance admins, we kindly ask you to carefully review our instance and its policies before defederating from us.

To all ani.social users, please do not forget to report content that violates our content policy.

My personal thoughts

As the admin of ani.social, I sincerely apologize to all our users regarding the defederation from three major Lemmy instances. I believe that this is my fault for not communicating our policies clearly enough. I will continue working toward a solution regarding this matter so please be patient.

Thank you for reading this, and I appreciate everyone's support.

:::

Please do not say anything hateful to the Lemmy.ml admins or the developers. Before commenting on this thread, please read the post completely.

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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:

7. 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 (!anime@lemmy.ml) in which their episode discussion bot, @shinobu@ani.social, 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.

We have upgraded to Lemmy v0.18.3! You can view all the changes here.

If you encounter any issues, please send us an email or leave a comment in this thread. Thank you!

P.S. We've had so many new users come over the past weeks. Welcome to AniSocial!

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This announcement will be pinned for seven (3) days since the initial posting.

We will be upgrading to Lemmy v0.18.3 on July 28 4PM UTC. During this time, this instance will be temporarily unavailable for approximately one hour as we perform the upgrade.

You can view the instance status updates here: https://status.ani.social

Thank you!

We've received a few messages lately from people who got locked out of their accounts after enabling 2FA and not setting up the authenticator properly. To anyone else who got locked out because of this, you can send us an email at help@ani.social with the same email address you used to register. We'll remove 2FA from your account so you can set it up again.

There is an open issue about it on GitHub.

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Note: This post will be pinned until the 2FA issue has been resolved and until the 2FA implementation has been improved.