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Maybe it's not what the internet was originally designed for, but NSFW content is definitely one of the driving forces on the "big" web. What NSFW content have you seen or do you predict that you will see on the smolweb? Should it be encouraged or looked down upon and censored? Or neither?
As far as what I've seen, there are some BBS (the original dialup BBS's, not this one) archive pages that have a great deal of Erotica text files available. And I mean a great deal, several thousand stories at least.
As for what is possible...well, the sky's the limit I suppose? Things like roleplaying come to mind in a text-based context, but images and other media can be viewed as well...
1. Encourage NSFW Content As What (Some) People Want
█████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 21%
2. Discourage NSFW Content As Unwanted And Harmful
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3. Let It Grow If It Wants To
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62 votes were cast.
2023-07-04 · 11 months ago · 👍 Addison, Acidus, lypanov · ❤ 2
I think I remember coming across some erotic ASCII art around here somewhere.
The tricky part is that there is a huge range here so there is no one way to approach this. NSFW content can be anything from fairly innocuous to absolutely vile and universally illegal. This means extra emphasis must be placed on moderating such content in places where it is user-submitted.
The most problematic content (videos, large images) is fortunately non-optimal to share over Gemini, so that should provide some protection against the worst offenders.
Content moderation of that kind places an inordinate mental and legal burden on platform hosts... Invitation-only access to the platform is the only means of lessening that burden as far as I can tell. There's a difficult conversation to be had there.
Moderation is definitely an issue, but most hosted Gemini/gopher sites have some pretty tight limitations in terms of storage space.
I think if someone wanted to have a site that consistently pushed boundaries of what is acceptable content they'd pretty much have to host it themselves. At that point it's less of a question of moderation and more of holding someone responsible for their actions.
My only concern with it is the potential legal implications. Some countries might ban capsules, or the Gemini protocol itself, due to NSFW content being easily available. Other countries require an age gate or age verification for NSFW content. The only mechanism Gemini has to enforce such verification (that I'm aware of) is client certificates and server-side tracking of which certificates have consented.
A surprising amount of Pornhub content is gets proxied through the public Stargate proxy I run. The HTML-to-Gemtext actually works and extracts all the thumbnails images as image links... 😮🙈😄
@Acidus I suspect you’re going to see even more now with people (such as myself 😅) trying it out out of morbid curiosity
For me, good labeling is what matters most. I think having it sneak up isn't great but people who are ok with it should be able to find it.
Like it or not, I don't think it can be stopped. Especially when anyone can just spin up a capsule or self-host. As soon as any new technology gets invented (especially in the communications space), people will start thinking "how can this be used for sex?".
The legal implications are definitely a concern. I guess moderation is key, but that's not something I have enough experience in to comment.
Due to the limited visual capabilities and non-commercial appeal I would guess that Gemini wont become the porn distribution protocol of choice to deliver it, let alone with some amount of DRM or at least Vimeo-level of download protection.
+1 regarding moderation in combination with letting it grow if people want to bring up sexual or erotic subjects or post such contents. It's a natural part of human life after all.
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