For anything to do about this instance
Although I don't like the political strong-arming that defederation is allowing, I would still vote to remove the clause in this case.
The Visual Novels community, and by extension the whole instance, have not contained the content in question. In the interest of keeping the community accessible to everyone and keeping the instance "comfy and snug" I think it is better to have our rules better conform with the wider lemmy community.
My vote is to remove the exception. For one thing, I don't think anyone has ever posted "loli" content from this instance; at least not on the visualnovels community, so I don't see this impacting any users. For another, popular opinion about "loli" content from Lemmy instance admins seems pretty clear. Personally, I have no interest in the content and would rather not see it, all moral and ethical dimensions aside. I think it's likely the only reason most other instances haven't de-federated this instance is because they don't know about this instance or this exception yet.
The communities I can no longer communicate with that I care about are:
I don't know how this instance would go about getting of the defederation list of these instances, though. To be honest, I don't think it's actually likely. But in my opinion, this is still worth doing before instances lemmy.comfysnug.space currently communicates with pre-emptively de-federate this instance.
Not to worry king, we'll never defederate you (as long as you keep it US law friendly).
If you are wondering who did defederate you, you can check out this tool I made: https://defed.xyz
It looks like you have 13 other instances blocking you, 9 of which I would consider as big ones.
This is unfortunate. ~~I'm pretty split so I guess just consider this a non-vote.~~ Now that I've typed all this out I'm leaning towards keeping the rules as-is, so that's my vote.
On the one hand, I don't interact with/consume any 'loli' or related content here; plus there doesn't seem to be any on this instance directly anyway, so no existing communities or users would need to be removed. But I interact mostly with communities on instances that have now defederated or likely will because of it being allowed. So practically speaking, I don't really get anything from the loli rule, and my usage is heavily disrupted by the effects it has on federation.
On the other hand, changing the rules here because of other instances' rules really just doesn't sit well. I joined this instance because well-administered online spaces with positive vibes that are reasonably accepting of varied minority interests and views are as pleasant as they are rare; it would be a shame for one of the few loli-friendly instances to be pushed into conforming to the average, snuffing out one more spark of individualism and bringing the fediverse one step closer to homogeneity.
I'm disappointed in the defederations, but I can't really blame the admins considering how Lemmy functions; Lemmy is where the fault really lies, the way I see it. The lack of hard boundary between local communities and remote communities in hosting content, plus the lack of any way to make a community or instance invisible by default means remote content has little practical difference from local for typical usage (aside from the UX issues it brings). It makes sense that instances would only want to federate with other instances with similar rules considering that.
I love the idea of Lemmy - there's a reason it's the first social platform I've used in years - but as time goes on, the ripple effects of its quirks and missing features are pushing it into 'not worth the frustration' territory for me considering what I want from it: decoupled platform and user, where with one account I can interact with communities with all sorts of rules and values (which I'm happy to abide by of course) without having to fully agree with them myself. That's not really how it's shaping up. Whatever happens wrt the proposed rule change, going forward I think I'll be limiting my interactions on the Lemmyverse to communities on this instance and a select few on friendly instances.
I'm the admin of lemm.ee, I was notified by a user that your instance has this rule. I understand that such content has not actually been posted on your instance, but even the existance of the rule allowing it is enough for me to defederate you guys, so I am watching this post carefully.
I am not a user of this instance, so I of course have no say in how you set up your rules. Still, I would ask you to please consider that art depicting child sexual abuse is actually illegal in several countries. Perhaps even more importantly, such art can still be traumatic to victims of child abuse. I am fairly certain that the vast majority of people have no wish to ever to see such art. This is why I believe most instance admins will be defederating you if you keep this rule in place.
https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/comment/825228
I am personally leaning towards removal, but if a majority of my users want to keep it, we'll keep it.
I'm going to give you guys another week to get your thoughts in before a decision is made.
I will admit that I am leaning towards removing the rule; there is no content of the type posted but having the rule is causing friction. However, posted opinions are currently split evenly.
My vote is to agree with what you were going to do and just ignore it and move on, since it's easy to set up accounts on other instances anyway. I really don't like the idea of instances being coerced into making changes like this, just on principle.
I really hate how this whole fracturing thing is going across Lemmy instances. Forcing other instances to change rules the way that I've been seeing it just really rubs me the wrong way. It feels like it's happening all over the place, and it's turning Lemmy into a bunch of echo chambers. I wish there was some lighter form of blocking than defederation, like a default black that individual users to disable. It instances used something like that, I think things would be much better, since the choice would still be in the user's hands.
Here's what I would recommend, I think it would be good to remove the rule exemption permitting loli considering it is actually illegal in the us due ti the PROTECT Act. Then afterwards because I know lemmy Instances won't be so open to forgiveness I recommend changing the subdomain from lemmy to something else like lemmings or forum (can be whatever you want it just can't be lemmy because that's been defederated) and making the lemmy one redirect to that, then the instance will be able to Federate again and since the rule exemption that concerned everyone won't be there you likely won't get defederated again as long people here behave well.
I can't vote for any option here since I'm not a member, only make recommendations, I would recommend not allowing something that has a high probability of violating US law which could harm you legally. There have been people arrested for possession of loli before, it does happen.