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:
We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.
This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Understand that Lemmy.world is run by volunteers. It is not a company. They don’t have the resources to fight legal battles. The Fediverse is big, feel free to migrate to another instance if you want to participate in that community.
But why would lemmy.world be the target of those supposed legal battles? These instances aren’t even hosted on lemmy.world.
Because of federation, all federated discussions that have participants from an instance save a local copy of that thread to the source instance the user is from.
So any infringement on one instance will be an infringement on any instances participants came from.
And this is one of the reasons why a decentralized option just isn’t as viable to replace a centralized option as another centralized option would be. I hate to say it but its just facts.
I’d argue the opposite. Which company do you know that hosts or links to pirate material openly without repercussions? The flat design is the strength of this technology because it can not be stopped like a company can.
Decentralized will always be better than centralized. Though I will agree that activitypub isn’t great for this. Don’t know if we can do better though than ActivityPub though, seems like the best Decentralization solution I’ve seen but it’s still not great, could be much better IMO.
And a centralized option won’t be inclined to fight legal battles of this sort, so that doesn’t help you.