I think this is better tbh, I personally don't like it when piracy forums/sites/whatever piracy related thing goes too mainstream. Maybe it's gatekeeping, I don't know, I just don't want another Z-Library incident.
Either way, they probably aren't even against piracy, they're probably just lazy and don't want to deal with any of the issues they could potentially face down the line.
I kind of agree, with the caveat that I think it'd be super cool if the existing dbzer0 members also checked out other communities on different instances and made Lemmy more popular. I feel like that would be a win-win.
The more mainstream and well-known dbzer0 becomes, the more likely it is to have problems because of that.
For this community in particular, I think having a "federated community" would be especially helpful. Piracy communities will inevitably be taken down, but distributing them across many federated communities turns it into a game of whack-a-mole.
dbzer0 is no exception to this. There will be a time that the admin will start receiving DMCAs and will need to choose between complying and throwing themselves into legal jeopardy.
Unfortunately, the lemmy project maintainers and lead devs seem largely uninterested in such a feature and I lack the skill necessary to implement it, so it's down to an invested and skilled community member, if it ever happens.
posts and comments are hosted on the instances their authors come from. if the instance hosting a community gets yanked away without sending proper deletion requests to the network, all those posts end up hidden but accessible with their "canonical" link (which you can find from the rainbow star looking button on each post)
for example, the canonical link to OP's post is https://sh.itjust.works/post/2882678, and if db0 goes down without asking shitjustworks to remove this post (i.e. if it gets seized) that post will stay there until the sijw admins or OP themselves takes it down
(and if an instance does get seized other piracy-friendly instances can immediately defederate from that instance to "reject" any future removal requests wink wink nudge nudge)
i honestly think the z-library incident was a one-off because it was spread by colleen hoover fans on tiktok so i'm hoping that it won't happen again... but maybe that's just wishful thinking :/