Removal of piracy communities
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.
There is a local piracy-focused community at !piracy@lemmy.world. It's pretty dead, of course, only 4 posts ever, but still. How does this square with those others being blocked?
You have won my goodwill with your track record of decisions so far. I don't agree with this one, but it is not a dealbreaker for me. Thank you for getting around to announcing this in a public space, but as you say, please make sure to do this first next time something of this caliber is put through.
The issue seems to stem from the fact that the blocked communities posted direct links to copyrighted content. Duentonhave federation works those links get cached onto this instances server possibly making them liable for them.
Incorrect, !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a rule forbidding direct links to content. If those posts/comments exist mods there would simply remove them for breaking rules. Sort of seems like you're making random assumptions.
Seems to be a lot of people making assumptions in the comments here ☹️