I am working on rebuilding one of my communities. Originally it was a small fanfiction thing but as I have another fan related domain I decided to make this one a Dark Fiction site and community.
Thing is that Dark Fiction can get… Dark.
So while I am working on the ideas and which software to use for community, I need to figure out what is allowed for rules and discussion.
Obviously moderation would need to be far more lax than say Mastodon.art or anything from Europe. You can’t start banning everyone who talks about dark topics if they follow that topic to its darker logical conclusion.
Obviously Harrassment, KYS statements, Actual Racism, and a few other things should be banned. But discussion of how a racists bigoted character might address something shouldn’t be.
I live in the US so 1st Amendment is pretty open ended.
Figured I would put this out to discuss cause it is such a disconnect between what most people would generally expect from an instance due to the subject matter.
I am pretty much thinking NodeBB will be my go to for the actual software. Because you are right, this is more like an old school forum, and that’s how I handled things before everyone decided to just sterilize the Internet.
I don’t necessarily agree with requiring certain things to be portrayed as being a negative, but that’s a creative disagreement really. I kinda feel it would be more powerful a read if someone had to hear that and see a character not account for those things. If only as a warning for how easily it is to let the road to Hell be paved with your Good Intentions.
The fall to Darkness isn’t something someone goes through seeing how it’s a bad thing after all.
I definitely will need good Mods and another Admin. I definitely need to have people willing to bounce not just blatant bad people but those same witch hunters that seem to infect everywhere these days.
Witch Hunts always do more harm than good. And being part of one group or another shouldn’t excuse Harrassment or other bad behavior.
Disclaimer: have not actually read Lolita.
From what I know of it, if you just take it at face value it appears to be approving of pedophilia, because the narrator defends his pedophilia, but the perspective the author wants you to come away with is “wow, this protagonist defending his pedophilia is pretty disgusting.”
I definitely don’t think it should be banned, but a lot of people banned it thinking it was pro-pedophilia when that was the opposite of its point.
I am guessing you probably do not want a similar situation, where a fic taking a dump on bigotry (but not when read at purely face value, or just the narrators’ thoughts) gets removed on the grounds of positively portraying it. So that is one minefield I’d be careful of.
It seems that your idea is fairly solid already on what to do, then. That’s great!
It helps that while the subject matter is different, the basic setup should theoretically be the same as Fanfiction.
Forums focused on Topics, Moderation based on Actions taken and not just ideas, and keep the bad faith actors in check as much as possible. Genuinely bad people and Witch Hunters both.
The only difference from my old Fanfiction days compared to this is I don’t think I will build a general archive page to support it. I will probably encourage people to build their own sites to publish their content.