tesaguri 🦀🦝 @tesaguri@fedibird.com

We're living through facists trying to define our existance as pornographic. That's the main thing I personally found so frustrating about Hetzner selectively enforcing ToS. Like ashten said, why takedown notice a trans server but not techbro MAP spaces?

Kids having access to media depicting people their age living queer lives is so important. I will die on this hill. I grew up in a pseudo cultic Christian environment and was told queers are the devil. My first real experience seeing queerness celebrated was well into college. It reframed my whole life. I could finally understand why I felt so different, and I was furious at my parents for making sure I never got to see positive depictions of queer people.

The debate of whether Yuri is NSFW is asenine. It accepts the framing from queerphobes that non cishet interactions between high school kids are pornographic.

For many this might not feel familiar. But for trans people, having to defend our existence as something not inherently sexual is a daily struggle. In my country right now, they're trying to crack down on pornography while defining trans existence as pornographic. To bigots, transing your gender is a fetish and simply existing in public is forcing that kink on everyone else. Think of the children!!! Accepting their framing on this issue even a little bit is ceding ground I'm not comfortable giving up

So yeah, fuck hetzner. Worst they do is nuke this site until we can get our self host servers up in a week or two. I will be posting NSFW again, but also Yuri and wholesome content that only a bigot would think is pornographic

peeps are still asking questions, so here's an accurate summary you can link to when they ask.

for reference, i am the admin of woem.men. we do allow nsfw content, but thats not the focus of woem.men, as woem.men is a trans safe space for users of all ages. we require lewd content to be CWed, and actually encourage our users to make an account on our sister instance, lewd.lgbt instead, if they wanna post lewd stuff

anyways...

about a month and a half ago, i discovered that my ex partner is a serial groomer, and banned her from woem.men. i have significant evidence, and have had other instances in our circle verify it's authentic. unfortunately, for a specific person, named emma, this wasnt enough.

emma went on a crusade against woem.men, claiming that i was the real groomer, trying to push the spotlight away from myself, basically using my ex as the scapegoat.

she made reports to my old provider, hivelocity, linking callout, evidence, and vent posts regarding my ex, claiming we were trying to incite harassment. hivelocity did not look into the claims, and instead required that i just take down the posts.

so, i created a cloudflare account to try to hide the next provider, and migrated all services to hetzner. the plan wasnt to stay with hetzner for long: just to wait out a few months until nulled llc had capacity to home woem.men and our sister services. hetzner seemed fine, as i had talked to other instances who use them for hosting too

a week or two later (this last Saturday), i got an email from hetzner: abuse report from cloudflare, child pornography on your server. the email basically showed a forwarding chain: emma's deadname -> cloudflare -> hetzner. cloudflare included information on how to bypass cloudflare to verify that woem.men is, indeed, hosted on hetzner. the original report from emma included spurious definitions of "yuri", and a falsified text representation of the image. emma also said that she reported the artwork to authorities for being CSAM

for reference, if you havent seen the artwork floating around yet, its artwork of two fully clothed girls, probably something like 17-21 years old, kissing romantically. nothing worse than what you've seen in a disney movie between two het couples

hetzner did not ask me to remove the content. hetzner asked me to remove the entirety of woem.men. and if i didnt comply within 24 hours, the entire server's network would be locked. (they dont provide kvm access, just ssh access, so that would mean zero access to the server.)

i replied that the image was not CSAM, but i could remove it. and hetzners next reply (paraphrased):

due to the nature of the site, the site is inherently adult content, which is against our terms of service, section [blah blah blah, no adult content, nothing illegal, etc]

fedi was catching wind of this situation, and began trying to get hetzner's attention on twitter, bluesky, etc. my friend began migrating woem.men to her infrastructure.

a few hours later, i got an email back (paraphrasing again): "okay, ashten, just remove the url, and we'll close the case."

woem.men is already on my friend's infra, and so, is safe for the time being. but hetzner has proven itself to be transphobic and homophobic in one email chain.

(ill edit this post to include direct links to screenshots in a little bit. im mobile rn)