federation psa
Unfortunately, elekk.xyz apparently suspended this instance, because its admins are not comfortable allowing their space (which includes minors) to overlap with this space.
I do not think that the person in question poses any danger to minors or breaks any rules, so I won't take any action on that, and the federation status between us and elekk.xyz will not change.
In practice this means that while this instance still receives (some) posts from elekk, interaction with elekk users will be impossible, your interactions (likes, boosts, replies, comments) will never reach elekk.
If you have friends on elekk, it might be time for you to look for another instance.
I would also like to use this opportunity to reiterate that child sexual abuse, child sexual abuse apologies, or apologies of any abuse of knowingly unhealthy power dynamics are not tolerated on this instance.
re: csa, screenshots
@zorotl I'll try to make it extremely simple.
Consider three questions:
"Are relationships between a person who turned 18 yesterday and a person who will turn 18 tomorrow automatically a child sexual abuse?"
"Are relationships between a person who is 60 and a person who turned 18 yesterday automatically _not_ a child sexual abuse?"
"Are people who did not yet turn 18 not allowed to be horny at all (regardless of the place or the circumstances)?"
Are these questions legitimate?
Is it possible to have a discussion about these questions without automatically becoming a child sexual abuser?
Is it possible to, while participating in such a discussion, make a mistake or to formulate things quite badly without meaning so, without considering the implications, without automatically becoming a child sexual abuser?
Is it possible to then admit such a mistake, without automatically becoming a child sexual abuser forever?
@admin@embracing.space @zorotl@mastodon.social No, those are not legitimate questions at all, actually.
What Luna said constitutes a clear, knowing, and unmistaken defense of scenarios that anyone else would consider to be child rape.
None of what she has said between the understandably far-reaching social consequences she's faced for what she said has indicated that she has changed her mind about the core position she took. To the contrary, she has repeated it very recently. Nobody took her out of context, the posts speak for themselves. She was given a clear 'out,' a clear opportunity to say "actually I don't mean to defend this child molestation scenario," and her response was to say, in effect, "I specifically defend this scenario that you and everyone else agrees is child molestation."
@admin@embracing.space @zorotl@mastodon.social You trying to throw out a bunch of "hypotheticals" like, "oh, what if an old guy were to get with a teenager, wouldn't that be fucked up too?" is an attempt at muddying the waters here to cover for Luna, they're irrelevant to her case specifically. You're just making a brand new case in which you also have some fucked up takes. Trying to get out ahead of accusations of that by including a criticism of the consequences you know you may well face for floating this stuff really just looks like an awareness on your part that this isn't the thing to be posting. Maybe you feel sorry for her because she's dealing with consequences you think seem mean, but whether that's the case and you wrote all this shit with her defense in mind, or you actually meant to bring these points up, either way, you're involving yourself in the defense of pedophilia.
Trying to Ben Shapiro "hypothetically" a way out of looking like a grease-extruding shit doesn't often work out, and the way it comes across is that you're not only defending pedophilia (which, let's be crystal clear, you are doing, and which other people know you are doing), you're also, inexplicably, going to try to be big-brained and condescending about it. You saying "I'll make it extremely simple... consider these three questions..." and formulating your whole post as "just asking questions" is you treating this like a game of who's going to out-reason or out-logic the other. That's gross.
@Colophonscrawl @zorotl I'm not throwing out a bunch of hypotheticals to discuss them.
I'm not asking these three questions; that's why they're enclosed in doublequotes.
I'm throwing out a bunch of hypotheticals to demonstrate that there is a space for conversation about minors' rights and about minors' autonomy, and that participation in such a conversation does not automatically makes a person child sexual abuser or a pedophile.
I won't have this conversation there.
@admin@embracing.space @zorotl@mastodon.social Whether the words are yours or those of another, it was your choice to use them in response to this, in this context. "Having the conversation" is not the issue, unless you think everyone who got upset with Luna is also somehow upset at everyone else for even mentioning it. No, the issue is the position itself. You trying to add more nuance months after the fact to another person's point does not undo that. It is Luna's specific position that's the issue. It's Luna's business what position she'll take, ultimately, but if you're going to act like the high road here is to say "well there are hypothetically nuanced positions, therefore the conversation could be had, and therefore I am not in a position to be judging some particular position within that conversation," that doesn't hold up to even glancing scrutiny. What definitely comes across is that you are going to bat for someone defending a scenario that pretty much anyone and everyone else would agree is CSA.
You might be unwilling to do what other admins would do without a second thought, fine, but other admins are under no obligation to humor this idea that to shrug at a blanket defense of CSA because "some nuance might someday occur in a conversation like it, maybe," is the mature, responsible reaction.
Nobody to my knowledge is forcing Luna to try to return to Fedi again and again and again in order to continue to play the victim about mistreatment while also wishing other people would die for the high crime of remembering and recording what happened. There's no big public push for this to keep being brought up, it's just that she keeps showing up and perpetually block evading, which she for sure did to Flowless' twitch stream. He had to block a bunch of new accounts she made, at least one of which had a name directly referencing how she had been banned before. It's not exactly fun or funny to repeatedly have someone who defends CSA trying to insert herself into a social group where that absolutely will not fly. If it's your position that this is an acceptable sort of thing on the basis of "nuance" or "having the conversation," that's your business, but other people, and other admins, will respond to that and will take the steps that you won't. This sure doesn't look like responsible moderation to me, but then, it's not my job to run your instance.
@Colophonscrawl @zorotl It is a long post, in my opinion it does not reflect reality of what happened and what continues to happen at all, and honestly I don't have the spoons to reply right now. I hope I'll be able to revisit it later.
However, on one specific point:
"He had to block a bunch of new accounts she made, at least one of which had a name directly referencing how she had been banned before"
I'm not sure if you mean fedi or twitch?
If fedi, then please share these accounts with me (you can do it in DMs). I do not condone block evasion, and accounts on this instance should not be used to evade blocks.
If twitch, then I'm sorry but I cannot be responsible for what people are doing there, I don't have twitch, I cannot check anything, I cannot check if there was some context, and honestly if your problem is with how someone behaves on twitch, then you should probably bring it up with twitch.
(I wonder if reports I received urging me to suspend Luna for "block evasion", reports which referred to nothing specific, were also related to some twitch thing?)
re: csa, screenshots
@zorotl Are you saying that the original bad take was posted with a goal of getting sexual interactions with minors; with a goal of grooming them so that sexual interactions become possible once they're 18 and groomed?
"Something is posted in order to get sexual interactions with minors" is a legitimate concern.
Promoting this concern relentlessly over the entire fediverse with regard to the original bad take is acting in an extremely bad faith.
If you have any specific reasons to suspect some user of this instance actually grooms someone or solicits sexual interactions from someone under 18, I'll be glad to hear you out. Such a behavior is absolutely unacceptable on this instance.
re: federation psa
Unfortunately, some other instances, including tech.lgbt, octodon.social and monads.online also suspended this instance.
We did not receive any prior warnings from them; and did not receive any related communications from some of these instances.
We tried to communicate with their admins, but we were only able to get a response along the lines "we defederated because of you did not take any actions over unspecified block evasion and unspecified behavior of one of your users", and further attempts to clarify were left unanswered.
Considering that in the past it took us two months to get lgbt.io to reverse their block (which they imposed basically because of the technical issue), two months _after_ we learned about defederation and first reached out to their admins - I don't see any point in trying to appeal these defederations, regardless of what will go on with embracing.space.
So you may safely assume that federation with these instances will never be restored. Unfortunately, we also have no way of knowing what other instances suspended embracing.space (but we expect this list to grow over time).
I advise you to move to some other instance.