Izvy Raspberry

My anonymity here is a very fine veneer, but I wanted to use a throwaway as per your tags. Nothing here is anything I wouldn't say on my main, but I wanted to respect your tag (if I'm understanding it correctly).

I agree about what you said on staff saying "our goal is to be maximally permissive of NSFW content, unless our hand is forced by a third party" and yet banning fictional underage because fantis got mad about it (unless they count as a third party in this context? I'm not sure).

I don't draw loli/shota either, nor do I break the law or hurt anyone, as you mentioned. Some of my ships include borderline cases though, like a character turns 18 over the course of the canon. Having to state "the characters depicted in this art are 18+" has always felt... strange to me. I can't quite describe why, but this wording is something I have seen fantis use time and time again to justify their lewding underage fictional characters. As someone who has been harassed continuously by these sorts of people, it sucks to even remotely come across like them.

I understand it's probably not feasible for a site like Cohost, but I've been kind of wishing we could have some sort of Choose Not To Warn content warning here, like AO3, so we don't have to disclose particular ages of fictional characters. Again probably not feasible but I just wish this didn't have to be such a big issue. And again a lot of my ships/characters in my ships are borderline cases. I've gotten into the habit of just tagging Underage or CNTW on AO3 if the tags/summary/context doesn't make it obvious that it takes place when the characters are 18+ in canon, because yeah, again, I don't want to have to have that "the characters depicted in this art are 18+" disclaimer on everything (I tried before).

I really want Cohost to succeed, too. I really want to subscribe to their $50/year plan, even. I've almost gone through with it (the staff's response to harassment has been comforting, as I mention below), but if I'm not comfortable exploring fiction here... I don't know if I should. I really want to, but I don't know. And I've been recommending Cohost to basically everyone, but with the caveat that they will most likely ban fictional underage.

Another thing that concerns me with banning lolisho in particular is that a lot of it... doesn't strike me as lolisho? I checked out Baraag a while back, and I was skimming the admin's feed, and at the time, I wasn't sure if a lot of it would be banned under a lolisho ban. I was pretty sure the intent was to depict it as such, but the characters didn't look underage to me, so it has honestly confused me. A lot of people just draw in a particular style that is reminiscent of lolisho, even if the characters depicted are 18+. Like you said, it stifles creativity to ban it.

With that said though, Pillowfort's vague wording of their terms has been frustrating. So a blanket "no fictional underage" here would be less gray area, I presume, but it is still very frustrating.

I agree about it being harmful to the NSFW community to ban fictional underage. I always read community guidelines too when I sign up to a new site. Originally fictional underage wasn't mentioned, but I was of course wary. But curious. I wanted to try Cohost and I wanted to love it, but of course, fandom and artists have been burned so, so many times. I was skeptical but willing to try it out.

I wanted Cohost to be a place where I could explore my fannish interests artistically. Again further de-anoning but if the ban goes through, I don't feel comfortable posting NSFW at all, honestly. I don't think they'll ban like, noncon; I could be super naive about this, because yeah, like you said, why ban fictional underage? Why stop at just that? I really want to believe in the staff. I want to look past this particular issue, even, to keep using the platform despite it. But you bring up great points. I've been writing/talking about this issue a lot over the past month. I'm not really sure if I have a future on Cohost if the ban goes through. But I really, really want to. More than I ever wanted on Pillowfort or Fanexus, I think. Which stings, because I'm again pretty sure the ban is going to go through.

On Twitter allowing loli/shota, some loli/shota artists have said that they've been banned for posting that sort of content (@eulogaeic in particular has discussed this on their Cohost). The fantis kept telling people on the news posts to "just leave, you have plenty of places to go," but artists who want freedom in fiction, and don't want to be harassed, really don't have anywhere else to go.

I 100% agree with this: "it makes borderline creators like me feel unsafe and pushes away a good chunk of the kink community..."

With all that said, the thing that makes me want to keep using the site is staff's response to harassment. There was someone posting a callout list the other day, and staff took it down within minutes. There was another instance with a harasser in the original news posts that was avoiding being blocked, and when I reported the issue staff fixed it within a day. This gives me hope. As someone who has been harassed by fantis, and other sites have done absolutely nothing to help. But I can't help but want to be able to explore myself creatively too, in fiction. Sometimes I feel like that's too much to ask. I've been researching social media platforms, how they're made and hosted, because I want to understand more. It makes me feel helpless that I can't really help make a safe community for NSFW creators, because I don't have money and I don't have the experience needed to deal with both legality and security (I don't want to make the mistakes Pillowfort did).

With all that said, it really is... fiction. It is fiction. I honestly really do want Cohost to be a place where I feel comfortable. If the ban goes through I don't think I can.

I don't think staff hate you, though; I don't know them, of course, and while I'm sure they'd like the issue to be over and dealt with (I talk about it a lot in my personal spaces, and even I'm like... I have dissected this issue enough... but here's another post! And more thoughts!), I think they appreciate hearing other people's perspectives, even though I don't think they'll be swayed at this point.

Would it be okay to rechost/reblog your post on my main page? I understand if not. I know staff most definitely won't change their minds, but I think our voices are still important on this issue.

I also have said this time and again, but another thing I'm worried about is having to pack up and move again because either a site's become so unmoderated that it's Gab.io. (slurs and most likely actual porn as far as the eye can see) or the userbase becomes so toxic and up its own vagina that it's a NEED for everyone to stay on it and power through ala Twitter...

...I'm so tired of doing that, man. 👊

i 100% agree full-heartedly with this, banning "the Bad Fiction!" is always a slippery slope because the hill chosen to die on is arbitrary.
as jane pointed out, why not necrophilia? why not beastiality? i'll throw in my own one: why not feral?

feral art is constantly fought on twitter dot com, people debating how it's evil and promotes zoophillia, how it encourages people to become dog-fuckers, and more! obviously, that isn't true. but, switch out "feral" with "lolicon", and "dog-fucker" with "kiddie-fucker", then suddenly people start believing your BS!

i've honestly hesitated on recommending this site solely because of this, i do draw this kind of art myself, but i never planned on posting it here in the first place, i have an inkbunny account that i don't talk about much for a reason. i'm just not going to be a huge fan of this place when they start cracking down on lewd furry art, because this is the kind of slippery slope that leads to "four legged animals are bad" -> "animal dicks are bad" -> "any animal features are bad" -> "anthro animals are bad"

...oh, and this doesn't even begin to mention how much this all ROYALLY PISSES ME OFF as a CSA survivor. seeing constant comparisons on how "lolicon is the same as """CP!!""" stop drawing it!!!" is so fucking aggravating beyond all fuck, my abuse i suffered is not remotely the same as some fucko drawing lolicon! YOU CAN BLOCK LOLICON ART. I COULDN'T BLOCK WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.

also, the term "CP" is so fucking disingenious, i fucking hate it will all my life. the correct term is "CSEM", for "child sexual exploitation material". but, because of how that's defined, you can't categorize lolicon or cub art as that. because of that, whiny shits continue to use CP, despite it being hideously offensive to CSA survivors. they never cared about real child abuse, they just want to get off on feeling morally superior!

This is a very good and well-thought-out post. I too, find a contradiction in claiming to permitting as much porn as possible but drawing the line at age. I so rarely see the age-play angle talked about when discussing this topic, because that's what it is, age play. If you are okay with age-play between adults in person but balk at the idea of them wanting to draw the extension of that age play, isn't that a little hypocritical? We use art as expression and displaying parts of ourselves, why is suddenly that one piece of a person not permissible to speak on?

There is already a system in place that automatically hides images flagged as noncon from anyone browsing a general tag, an individual would have to opt-in, in order to see those images and that should be the same for an underage tag as well. If anything that makes it more safe for its users, because the other option would be people posting their ambiguously aged characters and simply never stating that they're underage in order to continue to post them. Zaush does this all the time on FA. Wouldn't it be easier and safer to have the tag exist so that users can blacklist the tag, so everyone tags things appropriately, rather than untagged and omitting the details so that it cannot be avoided.

When strikethrough took place on Livejournal many years ago, the removal of teenage porn did not suddenly relieve or reduce the amount of abuse victims. In its wake it swept up both the creative expression and closed the doors for support communities. It also took down accounts that only looked like they may have had underage content and did more harm than good in the long run.

You can say to yourself 'but we can draw the line between porn and someone talking about their experiences' but the truth is, you can't. Porn is still art, and art is a form of talking about one's experience. Banning underage says 'you cannot use any form of prose or art to express your experiences if they were sexual and occurred under the arbitrary age of 18.' which means the only way you can talk with or engage with the subject is if you're forced to express and display the real actual thing that happened. You can no longer use an abstraction to make it easier to express the experience, and isn't that worse?

And that's not to speak of moderation. So you want to ban sexual content that involves fictional characters under the age of 18, but how do you determine that? In the real world, there are 15 year olds that look like adults, and 24 year olds that still look 15. Visuals are not the first and only indicator of age. And to anyone thinking to themselves 'you can just tell', no, you can't. There is already a problem with stylistic artists and artists that draw short or petite women getting harassment and false flagging the art of their very adult characters in sexual situations. One artist in particular has a character that is drawn to look like him and he is harassed constantly for drawing 'underage' art despite him looking near exactly like the character he draws and being in his mid-twenties.

And what of the concept of aging up? Would that be banned to? If some fandom has a character introduced at 14, are they never allowed to be older than that? Is the concept of exploring someone's life later on completely off limits. Does this extend to only established IPs or would one's own characters be included? This might seem like a silly thing to point out but as a moderation team you will absolutely run into this issue. You will, eventually, run into the most absurd and bad faith interpretations of literally anything, and you have to take that into consideration.

Obviously, I'm aware of how difficult it is to moderate anything, there is just as much work involved with permitting sexually explicit fictional work of minors and not permitting it. Either option is polarizing, and permitting fictional content of minors or blocking it. You will loose a portion of the audience either way. And each choice has it's own difficulty to moderate. Either way you have to figure out where to visually draw the line for underage work for anyone that doesn't state a character age for their OCs if you ban underage content, or how to draw the line on where realism is or what counts being close enough to be a visual depiction of a real life person, if you permit underage content. Neither one is an easy task, but it's one you will all have to ask yourself which you want to deal with moderation.

(also if you ban underage, don't be surprised to see the followup 'okay, now ban noncon next, now ban incest next, now ban feral next' because that's what happened at Buzzly. So just be prepared for that.)

And to just cap-off a few typical arguments I see against the posting of underage work:

'But an abuser could use that.' There are books in your own library, right now, that have graphic text-based scenes of preteens to teens participating in sexual experiences both consented and not, with both adults and peers. There is no age gate for those, no blocks or filters, any child with a library card could pick up that book right now, and read it. A social media service with age restrictions and tag blocks/filters is more secure than your library. People seeking to manipulate others will twist clean content to suit their needs, hell, they only need to twist the narrative of Céline Dion and René Angélil to convince someone already enthralled to them that their relationship is 'good'. If all underage sexual content were to disappear they would still easily be able to manipulate their victims.

'Sure you can make it but you don't need to post that where people can see it' You know what else you also don't need to post where everyone can see it? Venting, Suicidal ideation, vague threats of death and violence carefully avoiding direct targets, discontent in fandom tags to ensure your ire has an audience. But people do it regardless, without being banned for it because they're allowed to express. (provided they're not directly harassing an individual) Because they're looking for people to listen and understand. Why should violence be permitted but sex not? Those that post underage porn do so for themselves and for comradery. Humans are a social species, why should that one thing be restricted from finding socialization? Because you think its ugly? I find telling X shippers to die, or explicit details of one's self-harm, or rants about how life is awful and only meant for us to die, far more ugly than visual depictions of one's age play fantasies.

I would like to point out that I saw the comment "we saw that the good faith consensus was that cohost should not allow this sort of content." I do not think this is the truth. People that wish to ban the content are more quick to voice their opinion and are more aggressive to those that disagree. This means that the discussion is one-sided, and the people that wish to support it often feel they can't state it openly. I highly suggest doing an anonymous poll to get a real idea for it, rather than only relying on the update comment section.

That all said, I do personally find something 'humorous' about permitting noncon between adults, but if someone is 16, it's just too much.

I think this is very important. If it doesn't harm anyone it should be allowed. Fiction is subjective, so is the perception of age. And there's many legit reasons for which a character may look like a minor to a moderator but neither the author nor the viewers are pedophiles: Very diverse body types, very diverse styles, proportions, gender expressions, coping with self image issues and trauma, and a very long etc. And the risk of having the freedom of expression limited through self-censor "just in case" will likely cause more harm than any good obtained by trying to limit the freedom of expression of actual pedophiles. (There's also an argument to be made that limiting such freedom may not cause any good at all, because either the pedophiles will form isolated communities elsewhere OR they will more likely to express themselves in harmful ways, i.e. actually harming other people).

Probably a good course of action is to make tagging mandatory for certain kinds of content, although it's not without its downsides. I follow an artist (I don't remember who they are on top of my head) that was angry that their art gets frequently tagged as "cub" in e621 because of the "tag what you see" policy, despite their characters being canonically adults, and subsequently being hidden to most people (because the tag is in the default blacklist). But at least using this very subjective evaluation for tagging has much less severe consequences than for banning.