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...
Difference 2 is it's not really powermodding. At least not from the way I personally understand powermodding. Imo powermodding is when a mod decides to get rid of content they personally just don't like.
In this case they got rid of a big risk to the instance itself, because, if someone decided to upload pirated content on here it would get federated to all instances that haven't blocked the one initially distributing such content. Like another user said on this topic, this could be compared to torrenting, only without the direct P2P distribution. The risk of course falls on the people hosting the instances.
Since they host these instances pretty much for free aside of donations, that are not a requirement, and the fact that, like nanometer said, you can just choose not to be part of the instance (and register to another instance), I wouldn't put blame on the admins of lemmy.world in this case.
Is that really the case though? They are saying they didn't want to risk legal troubles which sounds reasonable to me considering they're just your average people with a hobby.
They're not risking legal troubles unless they receive and don't comply with a DMCA takedown request. Like I said elsewhere, this is about making their site friendly to advertisers.
Dealing with DMCA takedown requests is a hassle, even if you never get charged with anything. I can understand them deciding not to bother with that. As long as they realize that in the process they're not bothering with a certain portion of the userbase, who will move elsewhere to see the content they want to see. That's easy on the Fediverse.
This community and other Lemmy piracy communities generally all ban direct linking. If there are no direct links, what is there to DMCA takedown request for?
Lemmy.world wants to put ads on their site. There isn't a good, rational explanation for this because all of the piracy communities already have fucking rules in place for this. Check the sidebar here. Rule 3!
Nothing for legitimate DMCA takedowns to be sent about. That won't stop DMCAs from being filed anyway, and those DMCAs will each need to be checked to see whether something slipped through the community's rules.
This basically means that even though the instance admins aren't mods on the piracy community, they will still end up being on the hook for doing moderation work on that community. It's understandable that some instance admins will say "nah, don't want to do that."
If that bothers you, switch to a different instance.
You can make a DMCA request for whatever you want. Even if it's BS the onus of proof falls on the instance not the DMCA sender. Large social media platforms like YouTube and Reddit have agreements with large copyright holders to deal with their complaints out of court but there is no way any Lemmy instance has that.
They're hosted in Finland. Is Finland required to follow US laws or respond to legal requests made under US laws? Pretty sure the answer is a resounding fucking NO.
Not every instance is good for every user or community. The Piracy communities have long been some of the biggest communities on here, however it's absolutely within the rights of the world admins to decide they don't want to support them? If you object, you don't need to throw a fuss about it. Just move yourself or your communities to an instance that's online with your viewpoints.
The crazy part about it is, that even if every instance blocked everyone, you could always host your own instance and I think if you host one just for yourself and maybe a few friends or something it probably wouldn't even cost a cent.
The difference is that now you have the option to go to another instance and still access the same content. It's not ideal but much better than yhe community being permanently gone.
To be blunt, lemmy.world has always seemed to emulate reddit too much for my comfort, even in vetting registrations. 9/10 of the bad enlightened centrist takes I've seen here have come from lemmy.world users who are clearly reddit transplants.
Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance, it makes sense that they attract everyone even those type of people. They don't understand the concept of distribution, of course they're gonna go where the number is largest. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's the admins fault for the people that went there.
"Though a 1/4 of a Burger may be bigger in their eyes than a 1/3 of that same Burger, the ingredients stay the same." - Winston Churchill