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.
You’re right. When I made the top level comment there was a lot of character art posted to that community that doesn’t seem to be there any more. I don’t see its removal listed in the modlog either, so I am not sure if the 0.19 transition has preserved all the logs or they could have been removed by the creator (which doesn’t show up in the modlog) after the scrutiny applied to ani.social.
Since I was checking modlogs, I did notice that the ml admins removed a post from the anime community for violating rule 3 (no pornography) that was a key visual for an upcoming show (“Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian”). The post for the visual to the local anime community can be seen here. I don’t think many people out there would consider that visual to be pornographic, but ultimately they can run their instance how they want.