Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy.
Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy.
This is another post that alerted me of this. https://lemmy.world/post/13287681 [https://lemmy.world/post/13287681] And here is the modlog: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity [https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity]
This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
Lemmy world:
- Runs the largest Lemmy instance, for free, for your enjoyment.
- Accepts all liability for content, local and federated (there's little/no legal distinction when you're essentially running a copy of a remote community)
- Posts a transparent TOS
- Lists which countries' governing laws apply to it
- Gave a valid reason for the removal of those communities in the modlog
Users, not even on Lemmy World or directly affected by this:
I'm not in the loop or even involved with LW's admin affairs, but I would imagine there was a letter or email to them or their service provider that prompted that and likely named those communities specifically. Going out on a limb, I would guess the community removal was a timely response to something like that, and based on LW's history, an announcement will probably be coming soon-ish.
Before you grab your torches and pitchforks, remember: Pretty much every Lemmy instance is run by volunteers that don't have legal departments.
This is why you don't sign up with the biggest possible instances, eventually they will become the biggest possible bottleneck in a network. Anything dot world admins do will affect all of their users, that shouldn't be surprising 🤷
As for dbzer0, this might affect users in the short term but eventually people will figure out how to access the sub from more friendly instances.
I'm surprised the major Lemmy servers even permit piracy related content in the first place. Half the Fediverse seems to be hosted in Germany, probably one of the worst countries to host piracy related content.
The .world team should definitely make a statement before banning stuff just to avoid this kind of drama, but piracy communities are not worth the moderation hassle and legal risk for a silly side project like Lemmy.
If I were you, I wouldn't expect the same privacy protections Reddit provides for their users when copyright owners start sending legal threats. These instances barely collect enough donations to cover server costs, nobody is going to pay an expensive lawyer to protect your IP address if your server gets sued.
... again.
What a bunch of fucking clowns.
Anyways.... !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Permanently Deleted
EDIT: dbzer0 had nothing to do with this ban, it was done by a Lemmy.World admin.
I updated my post after another user stated that it wasn't lemmy.world admins that performed the ban but the db0 team that did. I can't say with certainty that's actually the case since the modlog is pretty opaque and I don't have full knowledge of how [federated] actions are propagated & displayed.I (incorrectly?) assumed since those communities had existed for so long on the dbzer0 instance they had at least tacit approval from the admins there and were in communication with them enough that a full ban wouldn't occur -- when I saw the removal in the modlog I didn't even consider that possibility.Sorry for kicking up drama here if the Lemmy.World team had no part in this :(IIRC they banned piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com months ago. Not sure why it pops up again in the modlog. It was the reason I left lemmy.world.
A lot of people are saying "just connect to another instance", but it would be nice if the client could connect to multiple instances at once, and merge things internally, maybe even spreading the load a bit.
Probably a bit tricky for the web and linking, but maybe something for the mobile apps to consider?
Ideally the only time I'd need to swap accounts is to post.
The question we should all be asking is why did the defederate?
They should defederate from Lemmy.ml for having admins complicit in violating Strafgesetzbuch section 86a instead of this crap.
Well this comment section was an interesting read. Interesting how many comments still bend the discussion towards bashing lemmy.ml and defederating from it. People, it's not even the topic of this post?
Also it seems like very few actually read the post beyond the title? The problem is not lemmy.world banning the piracy community, they have the right to do so, that's how federation works. The problem is them making a promise to make announcements about such bans in advance, but they instead did it quietly in the background again.
Sounds like Lemmy has a tragic flaw. Not decentralized enough.
PSA: Lemmy.ml has a piracy community and federates with everyone world federates with so you can have the same experience.
Linking to or posting content that's illegal or in violation of copyright should not be allowed, but you don't have to ban an entire community to do that, you just have to enforce the same rules that are in place for every other community on here. Maybe someone can explain this to me, but this seems equivalent to banning a cybersecurity community because encryption get used by bad actors sometimes, so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned since information about staying anonymous online is "sharing the tools and techniques" that could be used in assisting criminal activity. Ditto for cryptocurrency, ditto for secure operating systems, ditto for drugs, guns, and any number of other things where community discussion is allowed but illegal activity is not. I understand the need to draw the line at actually sharing copyrighted content, but discussion of lockpicks or linking to sites that sell lockpicks is not equivalent to going around illegally picking locks, except it seems that is exactly the case when it comes to piracy but no other topics.