Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy.
lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
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Are you telling me Reddit is free to have a Piracy sub, but Lemmy isn't?
What's the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?
Reddit is an American company, subject to American laws, that has a legal department (i.e. has lawyers on retainer). Lemmy World, like most other instances, is run by volunteers and donations and is subject to the laws where it's hosted and/or where its operators reside.
When you receive a takedown / DMCA / whatever legal mumbo-jumbo applies to your jurisdiction, you have two choices:
The first option is free. The second option costs a lot of money if you don't already have lawyers on retainer and can cost even more money if the court rules against you.
Sucks, but that's the way it is.
Again, I'm only speculating that was the case here. However, given Germany is one of the jurisdictions LW is accountable to, it's not that wild of a guess.
That's such a broad question that I'm not even going to bother. Instead, I'll answer with the same question as when "states' rights" are brought up:
"
States' rightsFree to do what, exactly?"You're also free to run your own instance and accept all the legal liabilities that come with that.
You actually have a third option: file a DMCA Counternotice. If my reading is correct, the very act of filing the counternotice allows you to keep the content up unless the original filer "insists" (it's the mechanism against "DMCA trolling"). DMCAis not a jail-free card to erase content from the internet.
Possibly, but the DMCA is strictly a US thing. The comply or fight in court are the only two somewhat universal options.
Other countries have other similar laws, though. LW's TOS says they're under legal jurisdiction of Finland, The Netherlands, and Germany. Not sure what their laws are like, but Germany seems pretty strict about it.
Could be, but still it reeks of overreaction. Without the need of seeing anything else, it's almost impossible that Germany's law is that strict that "linking to (discussion of) pirated material" would be off, since if that was the case Google would be making Germany rich with their fines, which doesn't seem to be the case. It's even worse when it comes down to saying "discussing or mentioning" internet piracy would be illegal - under the way copyright holders themselves understand it, this would mean mentioning the market of secondhand sales would be illegal in such jurisdictions.
Yeah, until LW addresses it, all we can really do is guess. I've just jumped to the most logical conclusion, but that doesn't mean it's even close.
For what it's worth, as an instance admin myself: I don't get paid to run it, I have other things to worry about, and most definitely don't have time or energy to deal with copyright BS. That said, I can completely understand their position and reaction.
Depending on how my day was going, I'd have also probably "shot first and asked questions later" with regard to removing the community and waiting until I had time to compose a post about it and be present to deal with the inevitable drama that would cause.
Hopefully they make an announcement soon.
You seem to be confusing Lemmy.world with Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy is free to be used for anything by anyone.
Lemmy.world is the largest and most mainstream Lemmy server, so they need to be especially careful about legal issues. If lemmy.world gets taken down due to mirroring content hosted on lemmy.dbzer0.com, the whole network would partially collapse because of how many users and communities are hosted on lemmy.world.
It's not even close to worth the risk. This is how federation is supposed to work.
Isnt the federations key idea to avoid collapse if any single instance it failing? This sounds like the system has become too centralized around lemmy.world
It's definitely not ideal to be this centralized around lemmy.world. But it's also nearly impossible to prevent some amount of centralization, especially at our current size. With only 50k active users, we don't have enough people to sustain activity if things were more spread out.
It's still so early. If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized. A year ago, about 70-80% of the whole network was basically centralized on lemmy.ml. I dont have the exact numbers because I wasn't here yet, but looking back at the stats there were only a few thousand active users at that time and the vast majority were on lemmy.ml
Now, only about 40% of the network is on lemmy.world (20k/50k users). I just think there are natural incentives that will continue to push us in the direction of decentralization, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point where that starts to happen.
What makes you think that? I abandoned my kbin account because all the content is on lemmy and I don't feel like waiting 4 hours to get that content on kbin. People will go where the content is.
That's just because kbin doesn't work properly though. One reason why things are centralized is because there are only so many servers that actually work well.
Events like this removal of the piracy community will naturally cause people to spread out over time. You could even see people try to spread out on reddit by making new subs when they chafed at the rules.
The more people we have, the more diverse we will become, and thus it will be necessary to create new servers to accommodate these different types of people. That's my instinct, but there are many different ways it could go.
Content loads just as fast on small subs as on large subs. Not so for instances. I think centralization is inevitable unless federated data transfer gets faster.
It usually is federated quickly within Lemmy itself. I can't speak for kbin but in my experience on SJW, I typically get all the content from remote instances in real time.
I know there are some technical issues with the scaling of federation though, but hopefully that can be improved on.
Here is a dashboard of synchronisation time between the most popular instances: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/cdfzs0dwal3pca/federation-health-time-behind?orgId=1&var-instance=All&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.blahaj.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.ml&var-remote_instance=lemmy.nz&var-remote_instance=reddthat.com&var-remote_instance=sh.itjust.works&var-remote_instance=slrpnk.net&var-remote_software=All&from=now-12h&to=now
As you can see, the only three instances synchronizing in more than 5 minutes are
For the 3 first instances, this is due to lag and centralization of communities on LW. Moving communities away from LW would actually help solving that issue (in parallel, Reddthat is planning to open an EU server to reduce the lag)
Are these all lemmy clients?
Lemmy instances. The graph shows how long it takes for content to go from one instance to another, which is a few minutes at most
Gotcha. Makes me wish I had the technical know how to spin up my own instance. Those really are like subreddits then.
To be fair, for most people it is better to just use a another instance. Instance maintenance can take quite some time
Huh, that's too bad about feddit.ch, at least they have a good alternative in feddit.de I suppose.
Good info btw 👌
And jlai.lu for the French speakers!
And feddit.it also!
Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won't "decentralize" naturally.
Sometimes people centralize, and sometimes they decentralize. They are both natural social behaviors.
If people naturally gravitate to the place everyone is, why are we all on Lemmy instead of reddit? Why do I have absolutely no desire to be a part of lemmy.world, where everyone else is? People are not all the same.
It definitely has. Hopefully this decision will nudge people into other instances.
the dbzer0 piracy community has been around much longer than most of the users here. they spun up when they saw the writing on the wall, and they permit things that would not be permitted on reddit. and, it seems, they permit things that are not permitted on .world.
but the instance is still there. the community is still there.
and you can leave .world, join an instance that hasn't banned !piracy, and keep right on going.
You don't even need to leave .world, you can subscribe to communities on other instances.
Reddit's piracy community doesn't discuss the practical stuff like dbzero's does
You know the meme where Bender goes, "I'll do my own thing, with Blackjack and hookers!"
Lemme provides that. Servers are managed by different groups and you can absolutely make your own, with blackjacks and hookers.
Reddit has corporate lawyers. Lemmy does not.