Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.
The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.
In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.
If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.
I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.
I’d be fine with not hosting images entirely. I don’t think people come to beehaw primarily to look at pictures
I’ve been thinking lately that I kind of miss things like IRC where you couldn’t really post pictures in chat. With things like Discord and Slack the off topic channels often devolve into people just sharing random memes they found funny at the time, and not really talking to each other. I’m sure there’s value in that too, but I think it can take up a lot of oxygen in the social space, so I’m not sure it’s always a win. Different formats encourage different ways of interacting with each other, I guess, and it’s interesting!