For context on the topic, please read this post.
After reaching out to the Lemmy.ml admins and Lemmy developers regarding the defederation of ani.social from Lemmy.ml and the exclusion of ani.social from join-lemmy.org, they have chosen to remain defederated from ani.social for “[containing] a lot of sexualized images and partial nudity” which goes against their rule against pornography.
However, because they have found no evidence of CSAM in ani.social, they have agreed to merge our pull request to include ani.social in join-lemmy.org.
We’d like to thank the Lemmy.ml admins and Lemmy developers for their careful consideration of our request. Although we had hoped to federate once again with Lemmy.ml, we believe they have valid reasons to remain defederated. We hope that this may be revisited in the future as Lemmy continues to evolve.
We apologize to our local users who regularly visit Lemmy.ml communities. If you wish to continue accessing Lemmy.ml communties, we suggest moving to an instance that is federated with both Lemmy.ml and ani.social.
This entire situation is on one hand very unfortunate but on the other hand a perfect display for the superiority of the fediverse when it comes to censorship.
There has to be a conversation about who decides what does and doesn’t go on join-lemmy.org though because the removal of ani.social for no apparent reason other than personal bias is not going to be the last time something like it happens given the very open and heavy political bias of the devs.