Please do not say anything hateful to the Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] admins or the developers. Before commenting on this thread, please read the post completely. — We (ani.social) have been defederated from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] a few hours ago presumably for the reason of being “full of CSAM” which I disagree. ## What happened? The Lemmy developers recently launched the new redesigned join-lemmy.org [https://join-lemmy.org] webpage which provides information about Lemmy and a list of servers that people can join. The redesign looks great! It details a lot of new and useful stuff such as a categorized server list and mobile apps. However, I noticed that our instance (ani.social) was not in the list despite previously being there before the redesign. After looking through the joinlemmy-site code [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site], I discovered that ani.social was added to the “excluded” list in a commit a few weeks ago [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/commit/d17c4d7d2fbeafb6e39000332d0ac21499de5b47]. I thought that this was a mistake so I made a pull request [https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/266] to remove us from the excluded list (and also to add our instance’s category and language). Unfortunately, the pull request was closed with a comment that reads “No, that is full of CSAM”. The thread was locked so I couldn’t reply. I tried to reach out to the developers via Matrix, politely explaining that ani.social has a content policy rule against CSAM [https://ani.social/legal] which reads: > 7. Do not submit content depicting a child (both real and virtual) engaged or involved in explicit sexual activities. A child is defined as a person who is under 18 years old; or a person, regardless of age, who is presented, depicted or portrayed as under 18 years old. Unfortunately, my invitation was rejected and I did not hear back from them. Shortly after, I discovered that Lemmy.ml had defederated from ani.social [https://lemmy.ml/instances]. The last post ani.social received from Lemmy.ml [https://ani.social/post/861241] was just after the pull request was closed. ## What does this mean? This means that no user from ani.social can interact with communities from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] and vice versa. This affects those who subscribe to communities from that instance. This also affects the anime community on Lemmy as a whole because the biggest anime discussion community resides on Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] (!anime@lemmy.ml [/c/anime@lemmy.ml]) in which their episode discussion bot, @shinobu@ani.social, is hosted here. It’s very concerning that as an anime-themed instance, we’re now completely disconnected from this community and other related communities. This also affects ani.social in the long run as our exclusion from the join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org] webpage will reduce our visibility. The exclusion from join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org] and defederation from Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml] may also prompt other instance admins to defederate from us. Generally, ani.social will be seen in a very bad light. As the admin of ani.social, I genuinely feel heartbroken after what had happened. Not only do I feel like I’m doing a poor job of building ani.social but I also feel like I’ve disrespected the work of the Lemmy developers. I really apologize to those who are affected by this. I hope that this is just a misunderstanding and I will do my best to resolve this problem.