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.
I wish I could find the post/comment from a small instance admin that said it quickly became a nightmare trying to moderate without a team, and people were filling their drive storage with white noise files and crap, needing to be purged twice. I believe they even mentioned they were shutting down the instance and it being a cautionary tale of why not to join a smaller instance.
EDIT: waveform.social
https://waveform.social/post/310138
Thank you so much for finding it! This is it. It really sucks that it has to come to that.
I read the exact comment you just quoted. I‘m not sure either who it was but I could check if I answered to it :)
But anyway, I‘d be down to help if anyone needs help. I already told the admin of my instance that I‘m game.