Sharkey is a platform, just like Lemmy. Lemmy is a project ran by several communists (The official Lemmy instance will ban you if you say negative things about the CCP). Sharkey is the most fully featured Misskey fork. We chose it entirely due to that and separate from anything else. It does not mean we agree with their politics (because we don’t)
We’re not “welcoming” MAPs we just aren’t excluding them. Burggit has always allowed MAPs to exist on the platform, this has never changed. We take a very similar stance (if not the exact same) on the Sharkey, we even explicitly do not allow anything supporting or endorsing actual child endangerment/abuse. It’s stupid to exclude someone if they are following the rules of the platform. If they are managing to behave themselves and maybe subdue their urges through non-violent/non-harmful means, I sure don’t have a problem with that.
The people who would defederate are going to do that anyway. My own separate instance, Shota.house has been defederated to hell and high water, despite only having a single digit active user count. There’s not realy any instance I can think of which allows loli/shota. But would ban an instance outright for simply allowing MAPs to be on the site, provided said MAPs were behaving themselves and were not encouraging/endorsing any dangerous IRL activities. Anyone else would’ve likely defederate us, regardless of whether we allowed/disallowed MAPs.
Our stances have never changed. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, you have no obligation to use any of it. Like Burger mentioned in the post before mine, we are entirely self funded. We run platforms we want to be on, and we run them in a way we’d like to see a platform be run, while also taking into account the needs of other users.
I know you’re replying to Burger, but I had some things I wanted to share about my views on this topic and why I personally think the way I do.
First, before I add anything, I must clarify I do not support/endorse/encourage any activity involving sexualizing a real life minor.
Now for my opinions on MAPs.
You mention that you view MAPs as a way to publicly signal a sort of “Hey contact me for you know what. ;3” And I’m not saying there aren’t people like that, I’m positive there are. How I view it though is being a pedophile is literally the worst thing in the world anyone could be. Like actually a terrible curse. While i’m sure some pedophiles have no issues with this affliction they are given. I feel like the most unfortunate thing is that those who do feel bad about it have 2 options.
If a pedophile was to try and get therapy, they’re going to get arrested, they’re not going to get help (with a few exceptions depending on the country.)
I always felt that was the difference between “pro-contact” and “no-contact” MAPs, the “pro-contact” maps being more likely to be ones who are fine with their affliction and find absolutely asinine ways to justify it and indulge in it. Where as the “no-contact” MAPs are more likely to be people who admit “I have a problem.” And I know this isn’t the case for everyone. I just think excluding these people just serves to further radicalize them.
This is basically my opinion on other groups as well. I believe that blocking these people off just serves to further radicalize them as they find their own little echo-chambers which do nothing but encourage ever-growing dangerous urges and behavior. This isn’t saying that this will prevent people from finding those places and going into those echo-chambers, but it’s giving them the option not to.
To be clear I’m not asking you to change your opinion. You seem to be rather reasonable as to why you think what you do, I actually appreciated the clarification in your post. Wanted to kind of do a little clarifying of my own.