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.
Yeah I agree. I understand their concern and I don’t know the law around it so I can’t really be too mad, but I am disappointed. This is turning out not to be what I was hoping it would.
You can understand their motives behind it and still be mad at them, honestly I think they really botched this whole thing. There are much better ways they could’ve gone about this whole thing but instead of doing it they just decided to have a knee-jerk reaction with almost no transparency at all.
The way they handled the piracy communities was even worse, they acted on a troll whining about piracy in the support community who was calling for defederation of dbzer0, they only blocked communities but still, they acted on a single troll’s whiny behavior. It’s not a personal attack against them, they just did a really bad job here.
Now that’s some pretty damned important context…