Just to clarify, fictional representations of this type of work are considered legal in some places (the US and Japan) and totally illegal in others (The UK .. and much of the rest of the world).

But that isn't the question here. The question is, if you setup a Mastodon instance, do you want to be responsible for caching questionable content, not just potentially illegal content, but even political content you don't agree with?

I haven't setup a Mastadon instance yet, but I assume it caches more than what you just visit, unlike ZeroNet? And unlike FreeNet, what you cache isn't encrypted? (With FreeNet, you have no idea what you're serving from the segment of your hard drive you donate to the network).

They are in fact illegal in the US, if they are 'obscene', but what is deemed 'obscene' I believe is up to state law. A supreme court decision ruled that the material would be OK if it was not 'obscene'. I'm sorry I can't source this at the moment, I'd be interested if there's any more information about it. I believe it was something along the lines of the 'PROTECT' act, though again, I'm not sure.

>The question is, if you setup a Mastodon instance, do you want to be responsible for caching questionable content

I don't see why it has to be cached at all; if you don't want to run the risk, why not disable caching?

I had the idea that clients could choose particular instances to 'stream' from, and that the stream need not be coordinated by a server. In a similar way to IRC where you can join a channel, it would be similar, but with multiple servers. The server doesn't need to store the messages it doesn't want to. Though, I'm sorry if I'm missing something terribly obvious here.

I didn't downvote you but I think the flaw in your reasoning here is that who gets to determine what is a "fictional character." Perverts are never satisfied so the train of 'fictional' porn goes from standard waifu/anime stuff which is fairly tasteless and inserts itself everywhere[1], then a character drawn just like the person's tween neighbor or celebrity but she has a sword and red hair so its totally not her (wink wink), to photoshops of real children playing and put into sexual or quasi-sexual situations, then video edited with transplanted heads and such, etc. The line is too blurry to be drawn so the common sense approach is to block all generated CP.

[1] This is the more common problem. You may have a good gaming or comics group on steam or reddit or tumblr then your activity feed is all tween looking girls drawn anime style in highly sexualized positions or literally having sex with a slight blur. Then arguments for 'free speech' happen which is incredibly polarizing and the non-perverts leave the community. Now that community is dead and you have yet another zombie community of lolita-style postings which are frankly wank material and nothing else. It really only takes one person or poor moderation to kill online communities like this.

If you want to be upset, be upset at the people who do this. Not the people who flee from it for rational reasons, which may or may not involve legal risk. I can't even check my steam activity feed at work because there's always a person or two who suddenly gets into overly-sexualized anime-style games and posts screenshots. None of those girls look remotely 18.

The reason these images are frowned upon/banned have nothing to do with people having bad moderation skills... It generally is a slippery slope argument to child porn.

I think most people understand why photos of children are criminal. But is a nude drawing of Bart Simpson the same level of crime? Depending on your country (and in the US, your state) the answer may surprise you.

>who gets to determine what is a "fictional character."

Japan turns out tens of thousands of comics containing this material every year. Although I think it may be impossible to determine whether the subject is a fictional character or not, that's not really solid grounds for making the content illegal, any more than it is an argument in favour for banning material in which people appear to be murdered, or appear to be drug abusers.

With regard to you drawing the child of your neighbor, whom you only see playing in the yard or walking from school, what's the issue with using him or her as inspiration? You're not using the same name; the only similarity is that of appearance. In what way does that harm the child? Why should it be illegal? You've presented it as a bad thing without justifying it other than by calling the people who enjoy the material 'perverts'. What about if I make an animation in which someone who looks a lot like my neighbor gets murdered? Why ought that to be illegal? This seems like a shaky argument to me.

It is a very wild claim (which I know you're not making here) that these comics contain drawings of regular children. A single look at the qualities of the drawings would show this. It is just as wild a claim that most or any portion of anime/manga characters in general are based off real people's depictions. Aside from parody, I have never seen a real person, other than popular politicians, being depicted in anime/manga, at least from a drawing reference.

>to photoshops of real children playing and put into sexual or quasi-sexual situations

This is already illegal in some countries, under a different law. I do not necessarily disagree with this material being disallowed, though. There is a very wide divide between manga material and photoshops or rotoscopes of real children. The division is so wide that a judge or magistrate could probably tell the difference, better yet, an expert could tell the difference too.

>all tween looking girls drawn anime style in highly sexualized positions or literally having sex with a slight blur.

Unfollow those people, I can't really see the issue. I don't follow baseball magasines, because I'm not into baseball. Or, find a way to filter out that content, which is frequently marked as 'NSFW'. Taking your point specifically though, both Reddit and Tumblr have taken steps to block the material, though of course sometimes it leaks through.

>Not the people who flee from it for rational reasons.

I want to be clear that I do not enjoy the material myself, and I do not blame the people trying to escape from viewing it. I also don't like a host of other things that are disgusting to me, and nobody would blame me for not wanting to see it, or blocking it, or not wanting it on a website I have. My point relates more to the aspect of making it illegal even to possess which is the current law in some Commonwealth nations, which I very strongly disagree with.

>I can't even check my steam activity feed at work because there's always a person or two who suddenly gets into overly-sexualized anime-style games and posts screenshots. None of those girls look remotely 18.

You should your tell your friend that you don't want to see that. I'm not really sure what point you're making here; saying that you don't want to see certain things is not an argument for censoring it at the country-level, even to criminalise possession. This last point is almost certainly also be said for legal pornography too, though I doubt you're in favour of making that illegal.

People will downvote any dissenting or unpopular opinion, regardless of the quality or relevance of the posts you write. It's a shitty system popularized by Reddit and I can't wait until it dies (which, unfortunately, will not happen soon enough).

Off topic and not something people are likely going to want to discuss on a forum most of us visit from work.

Yet there are much "worse" articles posted here, or at least there have been. There was an article about Falkvinge arguing to legalise photographic child pornography, which was posted here. It got a large number of upvotes. This article inside it talks about the issue. The issue doesn't have to be discussed right now, it can be discussed when people at home. People don't have to even look at my comment, though in my judgment it seems as though you might find any sort of discussion when you go to a HN comments thread, some unsavory.

There's also a lot of people who aren't viewing from work. I'm not asking people to discuss my point, though just because you don't want to discuss, it doesn't mean the correct response is to downvote my comment.

It is tangentially related, and frequently we find even more 'off topic' posts getting upvoted, such as even those about the website's JS and CSS quirks. My point ties in well with why certain content can't be carried, which is in line or at least related to the article itself.

I'm really failing to see your point, and it doesn't justify the downvotes.

> that you seem strangely interested in

Not sure why that's being zoomed in on. The very manifesto of HN is to post things that are strangely interesting.

And yet it would have appeared on your screen nevertheless. You, or others in your position, also wouldn't have replied to me in such an instance, if you didn't want to discuss the topic. I was asking for a reason why my comment was being downvoted, not why people weren't replying to it.

The discussion is not only about Mastodon, but the importance and meaning and implementation of censorship on Mastodon instances. It is as much a political and social issue as it is a technical one, as any article about tech law or policy will tell you. I picked up on one particular aspect of the social issue. Your explanation, well intentioned as it may have been, failed to explain why people were downvoting, or at least from my point of view failed to rationalise the behavior of the downvoters.

I think I've whined about downvotes (specific ones and in general terms) in the distant past (it gets you nowhere, and is boring) and I think they often cause the kind of negativity this site otherwise attempts to avoid, but in this case maybe some people just disagree with you on the tangential subject you brought up, but didn't want to get into a discussion about it with you, or didn't want to see a discussion on that subject float to the top.

Please don't mistake me, I wasn't trying to whine about downvotes. I wanted to find out the reason why people are downvoting, rather than replying. Hacker News strikes me as a very odd place; on one hand, encouraging discussion of interesting topics, on the other hand, giving a group of people with more than 500 points this ability to hide discussion they like.

It would be much better if, rather than disagreeing by downvoting, which is effectively a statement like "I don't like that" (which humorously, HN discourages if you state explicitly), to either say nothing at all (like those with <500 karma) or to state your disagreement.

For me it's hard, too. The HN moderators have decided to block me from posting too quickly. I never used to get this message until recently; now I am told that "You're posting too fast, please slow down.", which to be honest, I can't describe the words of irritation I would otherwise use if I wasn't being civil on this forum. It's so silly to be stopping people from engaging in quick discussion. I know it's to prevent flamewars, but the fact that it applies even if I'm not flaming (which I don't do much here) is ridiculous.

The worst part is where the HN moderators roll in with the classic "we've detached this and marked it off-topic". This is perhaps the one thing which reddit/<n>chan gets right, the moderators won't tell you that something is off topic just because they think it is. It evidently isn't off topic if people are discussing it.

This website really does baffle me sometimes. In some cases it's unparalleled for informative discussion where I can learn sometimes about hotter topics. On the other hand, it has this truly horrible and infantile elite-downvoters culture which exists to control how you think and what kind of opinions you espouse, for fear of being downvoted. It encourages self-censure to the tune of the opinion of the downvoting group. You have to dance their jig, or have your comment greyed out, which probably attracts more downvotes.

Having one discussion floating to the top doesn't mean that the other discussions are unavailable. If it really is as uninteresting as the downvoter thinks it is, few people will engage in it.

I'm sorry for the rant, but this website is very grating, and it's not because of the users, it's because of the way it's run, and what powers the users have. It's almost as if downvoting was implemented beacuse it's known to be exactly like an "I don't like that" message, which will make anyone annoyed when all they want to do is engage in thoughtful discussion. And don't get me started on how people will downvote you on topics when you speak of politics they disagree with or make cogent points. I've noticed this on both sides; when I speak of my Communism and anarchism, I'm getting downvoted for it. When some speak of their strongly libertarian "an"cap principles, they're getting downvoted. And time and time again, I've been told by those helpful commenters - it's not beacuse of the quality of my comments. It's just that people disagree. And that means I get my comment greyed out and I'm not allowed to post more than twice every two hours.

I really wish intelligent discussion like on HN would take place on other websites (except reddit). That way, I wouldn't have to deal with this elite-downvoter culture. And before someone brings up the point that discussion here is intelligent because of the power to downvote, it would be nice if there were some evidence for that assertion. Mailing lists and forums and the old-style chans (by old-style I mean before the addition of backlinks and "(You)"s) didn't have downvotes.