Tl;dr if you don’t want to read this: Block Pawoo.net or at least remove avatars from it, and be sure you have open sign ups off!
The fediverse has a very unique problem; one of the largest instances on the fediverse is Pawoo.net. It’s a Japanese speaking fediverse instance which started as a Pixiv offshoot in 2017, only to be passed around to several owners, first some game publisher and then some Crypto firm that also owns mstdn.jp or something. Pawoo has always been a controversial instance from the get-go, a post from the early days of the fedi released after the great censorship wave of August 2017 talks about the inconvenient truth with why Mastodon blew up in Japan. In particular Twitter began to ban/crack down on lolicon art seemingly. While this art is legal in Japan, in the west it has both negative connotations and the legality is questionable. On Pleroma, there are usually endless fights over the “loli question”, which I’ll deflect to a 2020 post from the admin of FSE which says “the laws are bullshit but I won’t go to jail for 5-20 trying to fight said law in court”. The same goes on in Twitter of course, in fact people are even more passionate about drawings having rights or their rights to jerk off to drawings.
Anyhow, Pawoo was run by Pixiv, which still allows these kinds of images (even if there are rumors they’ll get banned to please the high-ESG overlords of BlackRock and pals). So naturally many more controversial artists and users burnt out with Twitter began to move to Pawoo, and naturally a fediverse community boomed in Japan. Misskey’s popularity and existence is a direct result of this popularity. Nowadays there are a lot of normal people on Pawoo, like people posting photos of their cats and all. Pawoo is now one of the largest fediverse instances, and with open registration you can see where I’m going with this.
Pawoo has become notorious for discarding any English reports, as Mastodon side users began to report loli images for “child porn” and whatnot. The problem is, due to this moderation style Pawoo now has a problem on their hands with users signing up and advertising or posting actual child porn because anyone telling them otherwise will get ignored because English reports. This has already backfired on Pawoo at least once as their registrar in the past dropped them not long ago. Afterwards Pawoo got sold off yet again, with yet another new owner who refused to address the problem. Not only are open signups still open and not only does the website still point to its old owner, but recently something major has been happening: users are now singing up with CP avatars and liking random posts, causing remote instances to fetch the users. Naturally Pawoo’s administration either doesn’t give a shit or is too slow to address the problem.
There’s a good way of dealing with illegal content in avatars aside from MRFing an entire instance; if you don’t want to outright block pawoo.net because some artist you follow is there, go into adminFE and block the avatars under the MRF settings. Recently as a result of this more and more instances lax on speech rules have been blocking Pawoo because they are literally not banning illegal (even in Japan) content.
There’s a major lesson to be learnt from this whole saga however and it’s simple; if you run a massive instance please for the love of god moderate it to some degree at least, or restrict registrations. Pedophiles aren’t the only problem caused by open registration either. Recently a lot of fediverse instances went private or locked down registrations after an admin of another instance (Alex Linder, who has a whole wiki page and SPLC pages on him that scream “fed” since he can somehow get away with calling for people to be killed), allegedly signed up for an instance that was trolling him to post a fake bomb threat. The instance owners then got contacted by the FBI over this incident.
Even Baraag, a similar instance to Pawoo with the same reputation as Pawoo in some circles (posting lolicon) is nowhere near as bad for one reason, Baraag has open sign ups shut off. Pawoo does not, and this means that Baraag ends up being defederated more for the content of the art instead of for not banning spambots. Baraag prefers quality over quantity and also keeping out the CP spammers, killing 2 birds with one stone.
In other words, if you run a fediverse instance and moreso one that could attract unsavory types (fedposters, pedophiles, etc.), please turn off registrations. In fact you should have them be approval only at best, to keep low quality people from signing up and to avoid moderation nightmares like this one. While this is somewhat of a quick post, my point here is moderate your instance to avoid similar happening. If your instance is as big as Pawoo is, you might also want to make sure your instance only has users from one language on it, or you’ll want to have multilingual moderators (at all times worldwide) to avoid new users or inactive accounts fedposting while you’re asleep. Otherwise, you’ll run into the same moderation issues Pawoo is having.
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