Remote View

1y ago

Some updates about Lemmy NSFW

There are issues that have been on my mind for a few days, and I wanted to talk about them with you.

Downvotes

As you may notice, downvotes have been completely off for the last few days. I did this because I couldn't resist the pressure of some friends :/ I still don't know what to do about this. The majority of members probably want it to be completely open. As mods, posters and admins; some think it should be closed, some think it should be restricted (I guess).

I guess there is no solution that makes everyone happy. I realized I don't have admin skills in stressful situations, I'm a fucking stupid lol :D I miss @gabe so much.

lemmyposter212 suggested "fuzzy votes" or something that can work for us too. I think I'll just ghost this issue for a while.

Donations

As you know, all our donation accounts have been closed. Since it was my first time opening a site in the NSFW area, I had no experience. I reviewed some adult donation sites but most of them were shady. Honestly I couldn't trust them.

There are only coins now. But I guess most people don't want to deal with coins. It is because I didn't get any donations about 4 months now :D Those sent from Github Sponsor or Patreon were also returned to donators as well. I received $200-ish donations so far.

We are currently the 2nd largest instance in Lemmy. After lemmy.world, we're bigger than lemmy.ml and lemm.ee! I don't think it will work this way anymore. On an annual basis, I need to spend a month's salary for Lemmy NSFW.

Does anyone have an idea to solve this problem?

107 comments

First off: thanks for running this site.
Second: you made the right choice with downvotes. There are too many people who downvote stuff outside their kink. I've seen more dudes showcasing their junk since you started. That isn't my thing, but it's good for the community.
Third: I'm gonna have to look up this coin thing. You got a link?
Fourth: the gallery sounds cool.
- Thanks my buddy :) There is a post I'm using for it which is here: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/87160
- Side note; is it gay to upvote a picture of a dong?
  
  Only if you're not sure

First and foremost - thank you for everything you do running lemmynsfw. You're doing an amazing job and I, for one, appreciate it tremendously.
Re: downvotes, I still believe that downvotes open only to community members is the way to go, but I appreciate you're doing what you feel is best and if you think it's genuinely improving things to turn them off entirely, you do what you need to do. I'm willing to be convinced, I truly am, but I haven't been yet. That said, I found a workaround to my biggest problem with it - hiding read posts without voting - so I don't have to upvote things I don't like just to make them go away. With that in place, I can live with it. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to browse without seeing the same posts more than once.
Re: donations, it's truly a shame that you haven't been able to set something up. I was here right at the beginning, and I was a very early donor, because I truly believe that Lemmy needs a dedicated place for NSFW content, I want lemmynsfw (and Lemmy as a whole) to succeed, and I understand how much it costs to host such a place. So I'd be very happy to donate again if you can find a channel. That said, I don't want to have to do so using some sort of cryptocurrency. Not only because, like Lemmy itself, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but also because (unlike Lemmy), at the end of the day I find the entire crypto world to be very scammy and shady, rampant with bad actors. Not to mention that Trocador app you linked to elsewhere doesn't seem to handle setting up monthly recurring donations, which is what I'd like to do.
My suggestion would be to investigate Epoch as a payment processor. I have joined multiple porn sites in the past, and they've all used Epoch for their billing, and at least I personally have never had a problem. They seem on the up-and-up to me (but again, I said investigate - please do your own due diligence). What I don't know is if they handle one-time donations, or if they just do monthly billing.
Re: Gallery, I'll be honest I'm not that interested in new UI's for Lemmy. The default UI + TamperMonkey scripts (LemmyTools + Lemmy Keyboard Navigation) work great for me and pretty much reproduce old.reddit on PC, and Sync took me all of 2 or 3 days to adjust to on Android and now I'm cool with it. I think it's wonderful you want to keep contributing to the Lemmy universe, and it's awesome you found someone to help, but just speaking for myself, I'd view this one as pretty low priority.
Once again, thank you. You invest so much time and energy here it's crazy. Hope you get the donation channel issue worked out very soon, so I can start contributing again.
- Epoch seemed safe to me too. But they responded as below for "donations":
  "Thanks for the email and details. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide processing due to the billing being for donations. We are ok with the NSFW content; however, with our structure with our Acquirer/Bank, our services can not be used for the billing of donations."
  
  Oh that's really a bummer :-(
  What about making a free onlyfans or fansly where someone could "tip" to donate? You wouldn't have to actually put up any content.
  
  Well, then how about this. Make LemmyNSFW a premium service. Anyone on any instances can post, comment, vote, admin, etc on the communities housed here, but if you want to have a user@lemmynsfw.com account you have to pay a $1 a month subscription fee. Then you offer the ability to tip more if you want 😉
  This might sound a little extreme at first, but LemmyNSFW really just needs to be a hub for its communities to offer the core value it gives to the greater Lemmyverse. Hosting user accounts is kind of secondary. And having pr0n available is essential for Lemmy as a whole to be a truly viable Reddit replacement. Look at PornLemmy, they've been trying to sell it for the past 4 months and don't seem like they'll be around in the long haul. Some instances allow NSFW communities, but many don't. That's what this instance and it's domain name offer primarily.
  I'm not joking, this could be the solution to them preferring subscriptions. In addition to crypto wallets, which you should still have even if some of us are averse to it.
- Hey! I just realized your username is from Farscape! I was like, "Delvian... Delvian... I know that from somewhere..." Great show. Ignore me and carry on...
  
  Hahaha! I have used this username (here and on reddit) for years, and you are the first person to call that out. Excellent!
- Isn't epoch for subscriptions only btw?
- Could you please elaborate on your workaround for hiding read posts?
  
  Using the Sync app (on Android anyway), you can hit the settings button while browsing posts, and under settings there's an option right there to hide read posts.
  On the web, if you click on your username in the top right and go to settings, there is an option "show read posts". By default I think this is turned on - uncheck the box to turn it off. For a while, this wasn't working, but it seems to have been fixed along the way.

My humble opinions are:
Downvotes are there for a reason and they should be allowed to everyone who want to downvote something they don't like I don't see the point of restricting it.
If you don't get enough donations you should try to cut costs,maybe purging old inactive stuff or optimizing the server resources usage/downgrading unused resources of the server..
I use Lemmy over an Android app so I really don't give a flying fuck about web interfaces of Lemmy.
Pray&Luck 🙏🤞.
- I struggle with downvotes for my tastes vs the communal good.
  If I'm scrolling through gonewild and I see a post from a gender I'm not into, do I downvote because I don't like it?
  No, because that punishes someone else (who's putting themselves out there and contributing) for my tastes, and it doesn't actually improve the algorithm of what gets served to me.
  If it's spam, or a photo of someone's thumb wearing a tutu, or off topic, or violating a rule then I'll downvote (this is pretty rare though).
  I also usually block posters who aren't to my tastes, but that feels too coarse grained because maybe they post in the asklemmy or something with great content there.
- /
- We will do some hacky things to cut costs. This also poses some risks. We'll see.

Well, regardless of how you might feel about the just you’re doing, as a frequent user I think you’re doing great. Moderation of any platform is a thankless job. It’s a lot like politics where the people that want moderation power probably aren’t the ones that should have it.
Downvotes. I think they should be on. I know brigading is def a problem. But on the other hand, not having downvotes enabled forces users to rely on reporting everything to a mod instead of letting the downvotes do their job.
The costs and donation stuff. That’s a lot of personal investment without much in return. Once I’m employed again I’d love to help out somehow.
Good luck on the UI stuff. I been on Voyager app on IOS since it launched so I have no opinions.
Keep up the good work amigo!
- For a few months I was just on the technical and moderation side and things were simple. @gavi was handling the management well but left. You know, everything is fine in the beginning when it comes to hobby work. However, as you progress and other work gets in the way, it gets a little overwhelming. I believe we experienced this here.
  The down vote issue is really complicated. Can't comment for now.
  For new UI; rather than replacing existing UIs, we trying to create an alternative for consuming visual content. We plan to have a structure similar to scrolller.com in the final product.
- I genuinely don't know so forgive my ignorance. What does downvoting do for moderation purposes? People still see it on their feed and don't downvotes count for "active" posts to be presented? It does not remove the rule-breaking post and if people just downvote them a mod might completely miss the post since no one is reporting it.
  
  It doesn’t do it directly. Downvotes promote self-moderation. Posts getting downvoted disincentivizes someone from posting another thing that might get downvoted. When you take downvotes away, people are less inclined to self-moderate and it shifts the burden to a mod.

I've lurked for a while here and the only disagreeable thing I've ran across on this instance is the downvoting. We all know users are using it as a disagree or dislike button and it breaks my heart to see people putting genuine and authentic OC out there just for other people's enjoyment and receiving that kind of treatment. In the past I've upvoted several posts because of this behavior I've seen with like males posting on gonewild being instantly downvoted. It's definitely crushed someones day or has even stopped people from continuing to create content for this community.
The only reason for downvoting I've seen on here is laziness for not curtailing your own feed (subscribing, blocking) or downright petty behavior of making an anonymous statement that you don't like someone or what they do. There's a report button, a block button, or an unsubscribe button. Instead they've decided to move a few inches over to be an asshole. Whatever the outcome is, thank you for making this change and giving it a chance.

Once downvotes were disabled I stopped using votes altogether.
You can't only give us one option to voice preferences. Alternatively I could just comment on posts I don't like but that would be considered harassment, and honestly that's extremely petty..
Harsh words here, but if you're putting yourself out there and get emotional about getting downvoted, you should probably reevaluate your choices. Go on only fans, this isn't a safe space that should be tailored to your insecurities. Or go start your own community and stay out of the ones that show you that they don't want you posting there. Just saying.
- Sure yea, why not! I guess you go on reddit and you start to downvote! who cares right? right. Like you gonna be heard on why you downvote, or they will notice it.
  We are getting downvoted for posting images, no matter if its wrong or right, and here its not only fans, its lemmnynsfw.com, we are supposed to follow the rules and use its controls right! Why we should leave and not you? We at least upload content and we upvote each other, report the ones that dont fit, still other users downvote every post they see, cause they dont like it!
  
  Ah ok, you want a personal cloud gallery all to yourself.. that's why you're posting here!
  Sounds like you have a few issues to work through, should probably get those addressed before posting naked images of yourself on the internet...

There's literally no point in interacting at all without downvotes. You're taking away the user's choice of what can get popular, that's the reason sites like this are so popular. If this stays I'll just go back to RedGifs. I can scroll all day there without votes and there's more content.🤦‍♂️
- /
  
  I usually don't "downvote it for the lulz" I downvote because either I don't think it deserves to be a "top" post or it's condescending and negative, therefore it automatically deserves a downvote.
  People downvote for a number of reasons and it gives the user power to let people be seen or not based directly on their input.
  If you just wanna shout your nudes into the void with no input, you can do that on literally every other website.
  This is a reddit type website, which means upvotes and downvotes. Not "just upvotes because downvotes hurts snowflakes feelings". That's not what this site is for and there's no point in changing that because if you don't want that, then why are you here?
  May as well take upvotes away too. People post mean comments sometimes! Take those away too! Oh, someone reported something and said something bad in the report? Take those away too! Matter of fact, no more text on Lemmy NSFW at all! Just pics, no titles because those can be mean!
  You see? Where's the line?
- I definitely think thumbs down has it's place. It was crucial for the infamous EA's "pride and accomplishment" comment, but it's the lesser used button and the most easily abused button of the two. The down vote has for example been abused by groups on other platforms to extort posters. Lastly it's not that important in determining what gets popular. If you don't vote you already did your part.

Thanks so much for the work you're doing here! As a reddit refugee, I really appreciate it! You're doing a great job 😁
As someone who posts OC, I prefer not having downvotes. We post pictures of ourselves and were getting downvoted due to our not being conventionally attractive (presumably). It was very disheartening.
It makes me more likely to post here with their not being downvotes.
You shouldn't have to put your own money into this, unless you really want to. I would be willing to make a donation if you can find a payment processor.
- That's good to know. Thanks :)
- Hey just letting you know as this post was SFW it got federated into SFW space and I got jumpscared by your profile picture. Would you kindly change it?
  
  if you have lemmynsfw.com federated into your instance I wouldn't consider your space to be SFW regardless of what settings you're using. I know it's suppose to be safer with certain precautions but nothing is guaranteed (some sfwish content isn't exactly really sfw like the celebrity sections) and protecting yourself is more proactive than coming onto a nsfw instance and informing someone else that they should change their profile picture. Instructions on how to block an entire instance can be found here. There are other apps and ways in which to do it as well, if need be I will help you find the resources to solve your dilemma. Also your comment comes off as kinda negative with the jumpscare comment and also asking someone else to fix your problem (there are plenty of profile pics on this instance you would probably find non-agreeable and asking everyone to change for your sensibilities while viewing a social media platform which allows said pictures is arrogant).

While I don't have any solutions for you I do have enormous amounts of respect and gratitude.
Downvotes: I don't personally miss them because I rarely used them. Either a comment/post is egregious that it warrants a report or reply, else it's worth ignoring. If the Content Creators prefer no downvotes because they're discouraging, then that's fine by me, more content is more better and the report button exists for "rule breaking" and "off topic".
Donations: No solutions only sympathy here. I hope you figure something out, I'm not sure the promise of a donation if/when you do helps or hurts right now. You're right that "sketch" is a barrier to entry for donations, but I can't donate the kind of money that my donation is worth chasing anyways.
LemmyNSFW became my main by accident, but it remains my main because I haven't found an instance I like better. The way you conduct yourself through challenges such as defederation, the Blahaj (sp) conversations, preemptive defence agains Meta... Honestly, it's close to faultless and looking at other instances it's hard to leave. Thank you and much love.
- I agree with you on downvotes as in I barely used them on this instance either.
  If you are looking for a new main, have you considered e.g. lemmings.world (not to be mixed up with lemmy.world)? I have my current main Lemmy account on there and so far it is good (albeit is not as "tested by trial" as LemmyNSFW has been so far). It's up to you though.

IMO up & downvotes both have a purpose. Content can be disagreeable without being rule-breaking. I've certainly found downvotes a helpful indicator in the past, occasionally highlighting a poor formulation that caused one of my comments to be misunderstood.
A potential middle-ground might be disallowing downvotes on post, but permitting them on comments?
Either way, big thanks to you for hosting the site, and hope the donations situation gets resolved!
- @SmuttyLad @yay
  Discussion about this in the Mod coordination room is IMO the proximate cause. An older woman posted an image of herself in shibari ropes to a shibari forum and got cruel commentary over her appearance and a mass of downvotes. And that kind of behavior had happened before in gonewild, driving away many good amateur contributors.
  I don't care about removing downvotes. But I do want strong enforcement when it come to the community hurting real people.
  https://lemmynsfw.com/post/6909667
  
  For sure, ideally this could be controlled on a community - by community basis, but AFAIK that isn't an option with lemmy, hence my suggestion of retaining downvotes only on comments.
  This would protect contributors from essentially all unwanted negative attention (since derogatory comments are against guidelines), whilst keeping negative feedback for a part of the content where folks have to actively engage to participate. (You won't even be in the comments if you didn't find the post interesting & engaging)

You could create a WordPress blog where people could donate through with PayPal or other similar system. On that blog you can write poems or whatever in exchange for donations. To be precise, the WordPress blog receives the donations that you will use for Lemmy.

Building community is hard, it's even harder when everyone is hard and/or wet...
I can't really offer much in terms of advice other than maybe reach out to people that have done this journey before? Top of mind is the guys and gals over at empornium.is which is a very active and alive NSFW community with healthy donation flow. It's of course not the exact same as what you've built here but I'm confident there is bound to be overlaps in challenges and experiences.
You do good work but you should of course not have to spend 1/12 of your income on helping us get off. Unless you're hardcore into FinDom that is...
- first time i heard about empornium.is. I can't log in to the site, do you know how things in there?
  About findom, there is so many people here to go beyond the boundaries of hardcore :D
  
  The site is invite only and I don't have any to give out at this time I'm afraid. But the people active there can be reached on IRC. I'll send the details to you privately.
  
  I have an account on empornium

I don't really have any useful suggestions unfortunately, but I'd like to thank you for doing all this anyhow ❤️
Hopefully we can all figure out some way to get the donation thing sorted out so that it'd be easy to get monthly recurring stuff flowing, would make it more likely for you to get a steadier income from them.
- I'm working on this right now. I hope we can find a way.

for the donation stuff, no one has mentioned throne/wishtender, both allow recurrent donations and are used by the nsfw community
- These sites looks promising. I’ll check out for sure. Thank you 😊

Reddit made exactly three good decisions. Downvotes, threaded comments, and subreddits.

Monero for the donations and move the domain and instance to a host that accepts monero. Check out monerica.com to find some
- Monero is cool but people avoiding crypto unfortunately.
  
  It's a bit of a hassle to use if you don't otherwise, and I'm not sure there's any way to do no-hassle automatic monthly payments? At least personally the crypto stuff is a bit of a barrier for donations because of those two
  
  Thats one of the few ways to fund something like this that cant be stopped
  
  Sucks that people let their anti-crypto prejudice get in the way of using an option that works. I made a small donation fwiw.
  
  Not everyone. Try accepting Btc, Xmr, maybe Ltc. Those of us that use it may be inclined to spend it.

Are "coins" like crypto? Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I haven't seen a donation address. Help me help you.
Also, is this the sort of thing OnlyFans can help with?
- There’s a post I’m using for donations from start: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/87160
  I checked Onlyfans but they requires KYC unfo
- OnlyFans takes twenty percent from its creators donations/funds.

On the topic of downvotes. I think this should be something that can be decided community by community. I don't like the blanket ban across all. It makes more sense in some communities than others.

I'm against disabling downvotes but I'm not that bothered by it.
I did come here to point out that the alternate UI links at the top of the page don't work.

Does anyone have an idea to solve this problem?
What about a patreon?
- We had that. They removed our account and refunded all donations :/
  
  Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/
  Donor box: https://donorbox.org/
  Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/about/faq#fees
  Anedot: https://www.anedot.com/pricing - 4% +30c.
  Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ - membership option. 5% transaction fee.
  Streamlabs: Louis Rossmann is using it https://streamlabs.com/louisrossmann/tip
  ko-fi: Used by db0 piracy lemmy instance https://ko-fi.com/db0
  
  Only fans?
  
  It sounds like cryptocurrency is the best solution here, unless anyone can vet a payment intermediary that’s safe and accepts transactions for NSFW stuff. And then of course has great security and can protect you from being doxxed.
  I haven’t been to your instance but I think you can try posting official Monero and Bitcoin addresses and directing users there with a pinned post, and maybe something in your sidebar - I’m on mobile so not sure if you already have something like that. Might be worth even creating a Vanity BTC address to increase the legitimacy - something like 1LEMMYxyzetc. There’s a lot of people out there that believe in the practicality of certain crypto coins, so I think XMR and BTC are your best bet. They may be willing to help if they come to your instance all the time.

My home instance uses opencollective.com to manage donations. Idk much about it butt maybe that could work?
- Open Collective is ok but we need a fiscal host in it that allow us. I have applied to some of them but no positive response yet.

what was the problem with donations in the first place? also couldn't use something like epoch payments ? Why not do something similar to fet life, where they promote in the very right side, but we will promote with posts, 1-2 posts per page with an ad, in worst case scenario. Maybe we should charge OF models? /Joke
Regarding downvotes, I want to mention the incident, where I posted SFW in my community and got downvoted, and then some users went over !womenwithwatches@feddit.de and downvoted couple posts!
Are they crazy? nuts? they have nothing else to do, but find certain posts and downvote them ? lol
Downvote should be used to bury things that dont fit in a community, until the report takes place! If you use it to downvote every post you dont like, its pointless!
edit: I just found this one https://www.wishtender.com/, its mainly used from findom people but could work.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned subscribestar.adult as an option for donations similar to patreon

If you can find a way to take money via credit card and not crypto, I'll be happy to donate.
Might have to become the first Lemmy instance with ads 🤷‍♂️
- I'm trying that 👍 BTW hot milfs in your are wants to chat with you �*
- @mammalian they won't be able to do ads, I don't think. Porn sites have issues getting ads from anything that's not also porn so something like adsense won't fly. They'll just get banned.

The most common payment providers for NSFW sites is Epoch or CCbill I know some fairly small sites that use them and have mostly no issues with them. However I have heard their customer service isn't the best. Unfortunately payment in the NSFW field is in need of a shake up.
- I applied both of them but no luck 🙂
  
  Really? Is it a incorporation problem?

Cost saving idea: if you could find a way so that media posted goes out to the IPFS network, it could help with the bandwidth needs potentially. But the apps would need to support it too, and the web view wouldn't probably get much benefit unless the user's browser supported IPFS too
- I actually believe IPFS or torrents would work but as you said, Lemmy itself and all clients should support it too.

Excuse my (possible) naitivety; but where are specific subgroups within this server? So can't folks post specific content to those subgroups?
If you're a dude posting your dick, post it to "dicks@lemmynsfw"
Or if you are posting your pussy, same thing, put it on "pussy@lemmynsfw"
It seems to me that if people are doing that, then when people subscribe to a subgroups, they will end up seeing what they want to see.
Or heck, create a subgroup "dicks&pussy@lemmynsfw"
Just trying to think about how to create a situation where upvotes / down votes are less critical to users.

107 comments