It is kinda lame, but people who literally go out of their way to not harm anybody don’t deserve to get smeared as if they are potential threats to society. The actual threats to society, and to children especially, are a lot more mundane and familiar. Climate change, the education system, capitalism, poverty, etc.
“Underserved niche” in the sense that the site outpaces almost all other servers by monthly activity despite going out of its way to contain its own growth.
Respectfully, there is legally no pornography on the site according to the jurisdiction it operates in. At best it is obscene, and it rightfully has an 18+ policy on registered users.
This node maintains the fact that it does not allow pornography, and that all local content has artistic value.
Because baraag.net contains no pornographic images depicting ‘Actual human beings’ within the meaning and definitions of 18 USC §2257 OR 18 USC §2257A, the admin of this node has been advised by counsel that they cannot maintain records pursuant to those statutes.
You can try and malign them as if they’re trying to “disguise” themselves to fit into society, but at the end of the day it is literally just people drawing what they like to draw. Admins are free to defederate them, they usually don’t mind it since laws in most places don’t align with common sense anyway, but throwing shade at a server that minds it’s own business is kinda pathetic.
EDIT: Up in the thread there’s an 18+ furry porn instance getting highlighted, I like how fediseer.com themselves endorses it, as if the furry porn on there isn’t just “animal porn disguised as cartoon-like pictures, that some people call yiff when they want to feel like they’re not zoophiles” 🤡
It’s not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren’t enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won’t make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I don’t know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It’s a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.
Yes, they are “provided as is, with no guarantees” but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
switter shutdown because it didn’t have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn’t sustainable financially to keep it online.
daystorm and pravda don’t count because their numbers are spoofed
mastodon.world and mas.to can count themselves as lucky enough to be truly user-funded and (seemingly?) sustainable.
OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.
Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It’s just pure incompetence and mismanagement.
Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.
:pawoo: Announcement!
Thank you for always using Pawoo.
Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator.
Thank you very much for your cooperation.
It is kinda lame, but people who literally go out of their way to not harm anybody don’t deserve to get smeared as if they are potential threats to society. The actual threats to society, and to children especially, are a lot more mundane and familiar. Climate change, the education system, capitalism, poverty, etc.