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Removal of piracy communities - Lemmy.world
alexandrite.appEarlier, 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: - [email protected]
[/c/[email protected]] - [email protected] [/c/[email protected]] -
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] 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.
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:
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:
Yeah, I’m not sure why some people assume it’s a problem. I’ve had a few accounts now. I went kbin to Beehaw (liked Lemmy more overall) to LemmyWorld to Lemmee (initially as an alt). Now Lemmee is the main. And if that goes sideways, well, I’ve got at least 3 other instances I’ve got my eye on as potentials. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
It honestly makes a lot of sense to keep illegal content that’s the source of frequent legal actions away from the largest general purpose communities. As you correctly point out it is extremely easy to join another instance where these discussions are allowed, and the larger instances have every reason to have a “better safe than sorry” approach to content moderation.
It seems to me the Threadiverse is too negative of the concept of defederation. It’s a key concept of how the Fediverse works, and is supposed to work. The people on Lemmygrad is looking for a completely different experience from the folks over at Beehaw, so let them have it. Lemmy.world has become the largest instance, so naturally they need to have an approach to content moderation that is unlikely to land them in legal trouble. And even if they didn’t, they’d be welcome to block discussions of piracy out of moral conviction or any other reason, just as their users are welcome to sign up somewhere else if they are looking for a different experience.
There was drama about defederation on Mastodon in the beginning as well, but I guess people coming from Twitter had an easier time intuitively understanding the appeal of it.
The problem with your reasoning is that these communities aren’t providing/hosting any illegal content. Furthermore, “legal” where? US law doesn’t apply outside of the US and vice versa.
My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don’t.
The fediverse doesn’t need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn’t be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter “e” is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).
Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it’s fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It’s simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.
If you don’t like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It’s literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.
It isn’t pedantry as there aren’t discussions of illegal content occurring either. If I talk about torrents (not illegal) I’m not breaking the law or discussing anything illegal. Neither is a discussion about Qbittorrent or Jellyfin. Neither is a discussion about the hardware needed to seed 1000 different Linux ISOs. Don’t let your ignorance of the topic blind you.
Can you point to the illegality of this post? https://beehaw.org/post/7156567
Do you agree that [email protected] should also be defederated now for posting illegal content?
Also, I am already using a different instance if that wasn’t obvious enough.
Hmm I shall possibly join that community to boycott this symbol, too.
Nice to see some discussion about it besides “lemmy.world sucks!” Pirates should be used to having to make a bit of effort to help avoid the corpo Eye of Sauron. The bigger a community you are, the bigger a target.
The beauty of all of this is that I can just switch to an instance that doesn’t defederate or is very prone to not do so. So far kbin has been very good and doesn’t defederate much, which is awesome
Would be nice if there was a way or an app that ties together all those individual accounts into a single view.