Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It’s incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines.

As Reddit now and tomorrow reveals more weaknesses, where will the OnlyFans creators, porn posters, and all those grassroots porn communities go? The creators need to make money by showing to a large and interested user base. The users need lots of content to choose from and be fed constantly, with very few hindrances between them and their…goals. Many of the niches actually have respectful and healthy communities, too. Those people deserve an easy to use platform, just as much as people that want to look at cats, some of those groups, arguably more.

The thought of how to pose this to the Fediverse, now, has been on my mind for weeks:

Can the fediverse rise to the task? Does it even want to? Should it?

Personally, I think it should absolutely try, but I’m not sure it can do so without several deep strides in tech and development. I’m aware this is a hot af take, but it’s undeniable that the internet IS for porn, and denying that would be a huge opportunity loss for inevitably winning this popularity context.

  • Spaceman Spiff@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s true that porn is a big part of the internet at large. You can point to countless examples where a product (even social media) lived and died by porn.

    But there are also countless examples where porn was never a factor. Most of the major social platforms today have always had an anti-porn approach. It’s debatable whether that helped or hindered their growth, but it’s always been a thing.

    Now, I can’t think of any where porn was a big part of their platform that got removed, and they came out ok. Maybe that’s (part of) why Reddit has been downplaying porn for a while.

    Right now, there is plenty of porn in the fediverse. But there will be the same challenges as any user-submitted porn site. There’s currently a big discussion about categories that are unwanted, generally offensive, and illegal in certain jurisdictions. The fediverse makes all of that more complicated. There’s also a big concern about the content being uploaded directly, increasing the load on every instance that federates.

    There will definitely be porn here, but I don’t think it’s going to work the same as it did on Reddit.