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.
And once again we have people thinking that the instance owners would have to discuss everything they want to do with them and get the approval of everyone. It’s already great that they’re making announcements instead of doing it silently until people notice on their own. Plus, it’s not hard to make an account elsewhere if you don’t like it here. I doubt you’re restricted to this single instance.
Yeah. In this thread there are a lot of folks who don’t understand how federation works.
Anyone can go make an account on the piracy servers, or a piracy friendly server.
There’s no need to hassle the mods of the “front page of Lemmy”, for taking precautions to keep this instance open.
The issue is that they have called themselves the “front page of Lemmy” and have taken the role to represent all of us to the larger world. This is I think the reason it rubs me the wrong way. Any other instance did this, cool. This one, not so cool.
I get that. I think we can all agree, we would like the Fediverse to be better than proactive defederation from legal activities. I’m not even arguing this is where Lemmy.world should operate, I just empathize with the challenges the admin team faces.
I do think this instance has earned the name “the front page of Lemmy” by keeping the doors open to new registration at difficult times to do so.
Sorry I would have replied sooner but .world was down again.
Made me giggle. Thanks.