Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were
providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently
not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were
removed due to this decision were: - !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
[/c/pira...
Honestly, I don't blame them one bit. People need to keep in mind that these instances and sites are provided for free by private individuals and not large companies with armies of lawyers. I wouldn't want to fight a potential lawsuit for "enabling piracy", no matter how much bullshit it is. If the admins of dbzer0 have taken the necessary precautions, great! Just join their instance if that's what you're looking for.
To everyone ready with their pitchforks, here is a scenario: lemmy.world may receive a court order (subpoena?) mandating they disclose data on people actively accessing pirate communities. As it happened with Reddit, they may ask for logs and IP addresses of people commenting, posting or perhaps even up/down voting content.
Even though none of the content is being posted/hosted with this instance, admins may be asked to betray user trust - or to go battle claimants in court. It's a lose-lose for them, so maybe let's cut them some slack, eh?
I see we've unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I'm disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:
The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.
It's reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they're cowardly acquiescing when it's not our neck in the noose.
That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:
I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the "main" instance.
Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I'll sign up there and check it out.
Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
Oh hey, now I'm probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.
Concern trolling about the legality of discussing piracy is just a distraction. Their goal is to serve ads on their site, and removing all references to piracy is a step towards that.
That´s one thing I GENUINELY can´t wrap my head around with lemmy in general. How is it, that the admins of one lemmy instance feel responsible for what gets posted in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT instance to the point they feel the need to keep their own members from even seeing it? It doesn´t reflect negatively on firefox, that they allow me to access piracy sites. It doesn´t reflect negatively on gmail that they allow me to use their email address to subscribe to piracy stuff. Why would it reflect negatively on lemmy.world, if their members also accessed piracy stuff? Are the admins of lemmy.world somehow responsible for what their members do, even if it´s not on their own instance?
Seems more than reasonable. In every case like this, I try to ask if I was in their shoes and I had that level of responsibility, what would I do?
I think anyone minded to check our piracy content knows where to find it and can register to one of those instances. This allows lemmy.world to remain a general purpose open instance for people migrating who don't yet know what they are after.
This could actually be an incentive for people to move away from world and that gives a little more space for people to move across and dip their toes in the lemmy ocean.
One of the L.W admins has said that it could be a temporary measure and they are just seeking advice about their legal exposure. They're also going to speak to one of the admins over here. So it might just resolve itself.
I just hate that I now need an account for every stupid instance there is, including keeping an eye open in which community is suddenly blocked. Tedious but at least them blocking is useless.
EDIT: Rooki in the LW Discord is defending the behavior and calling the people trolls. He's also trying to say that the admins make mistakes and should be forgiven.
Seems like an overreaction considering how many degrees of separation the instance has from actual pirated stuff. No pirated content is hosted on dbzer0, no direct links to pirated content either. Even if a copyright holder takes issue with the community it would seem unlikely for them to target one of hundreds of instances which federate and have it cached rather than the actual source instance itself.
That being said, I don't know where lemmy.world's servers are located, some places are pretty strict with piracy. Even if it's a small chance I can see how, from the perspective of an admin, it wouldn't be worth risking the whole instance and potential legal action.
Still seems like an extreme response to me, but hey, beauty of the fediverse and all that. I chose a small instance specifically to avoid defederations like this and I'm perfectly happy with it (thanks for hosting neo).
Plz can someone ELi5, how the hell being member of one of those communities "supposed" to provide assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, can be harmful to lemmy.world if al what I'm doing is to be subscribed to their communites via my current account to be able to interact to posts there while i'm of course respecting their rules. It's like, hey you tolerate illegal immigration, so i'm banning you from visiting my city.
As I keep saying everywhere else the admins of the various instances are likely going to have to abide by the laws of their land. If you don’t like that instance move on