After discussing with the team internally (admins & mods), we’ve come to a few points:

tl;dr We call on Lemmy.World to be fully transparent and explain their actions to the whole community, and we’re setting more concrete policies for our own moderation actions going forward.

——

While we won’t be formally joining the boycott of Lemmy.World, for reasons I’ll go into in due course, we do call on them to be transparent with the community and act in good faith in regards to whom of their staff came to the decision, why they felt a non-directed comment is worthy of banishing an entire instance, and what they’ll be doing going forward to course correct.

Defederation should not be a bludgeon to be waved around. Individual users commentary (admin or not) should never be the sole, snap reason that an instance is defederated due to the potential for irreversible damage to federation (loss of posts, comments, users, etc.) and the subsequent impact on users.

There’s a way to handle problematic users who say things you don’t like, but they’re allowed to say: Block, and move on. Rash defederation instead demonstrates behavior akin to schoolyard bickering, not that of an admin, a custodian, operating a service for the good of their users.

If allegations are true, LW has some cleaning up to do with their moderation policies, especially not using abusive tactics to hide or manipulate the Mod Log.

On moderation policies, we have an internal document that explains our federation policies with other instances. We’ll be making this public in due course, but here’s a snippet from it that we’ve been using since Day 1:

We are an open-first instance, however in rare cases where an instance has been identified as being, indifferent to, permissive of, or actively encouraging abusive conduct, that instance will be blocked from federation.

At this time, while we have distain for how LW handled things and for their actions (if the allegations are true), we will not use defederation as a weapon as we believe it irresponsible and an avenue for subjective defederation actions in the future.

Also, if the subtext is not clear: It is childish behavior to wield your admin powers as a bludgeon, and to use your admin tools for a personal grudge instead of blocking an offending user. “Go kill yourself” or anything akin is not a reason to defederate an instance, that’s overkill and I’m fucking disappointed, but when anyone can become a “fediverse admin” that’s the shit situation we’re in.

Confirming we’ve seen this and are discussing internally with the whole team.

✅ Closing as no further action is required.

Code of Conduct Update — December 23, 2025

• Added preamble section covering jurisdiction for legal matters against Pawb Social

ℹ️ Thanks to the efforts of one of our moderators, @southernwolf@pawb.social, we’ve been able to recover some of the lost data from pawb.social that was still active in Cloudflare’s regional caches.

Currently, this is about 25% of all of the known uploaded media files stored on pawb.social.

We’ll be reviewing the final tally of recovered data in the morning and trying to work on getting what we can reimported into Pict-rs.

Code of Conduct Update – Sept 9, 2025

Removed Rule 9 (DNP (Do Not Post) Content): We decided this rule was very heavy handed and have retracted it.

To clarify, e621’s additional rules on the DNP page, like the no “content that is not furry or furry-related” under “Avoid posting these things” do not apply. Non-furry posts are still permitted and encouraged as much as furry posts!

That would be linking, and we’d ask you also include the source in the text description of the post. Direct uploads to Pawb.Social are the only things affected by the rule change.

Code of Conduct Update – July 18, 2025

• Added Rule 9 (DNP (Do Not Post) Content)

Feedback can be provided in the c/meta community, or on the rule announcement post at https://pawb.social/post/28273201