lemmy.world blocked the largest piracy community in all of lemmy

I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?

Why would Hollywood come after them? It is not like people are sharing movies there. Posts there are etremely mild.

The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the "problem" is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.

But obviously that's too much work and it's easier to just be a crybaby.

This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.

I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don't really have much choice in this matter considering there's no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they'd likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing

Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.

I feel this is the fatal flaw of the lemmyverse. Before I heard about lemmy I was building my own similar system where you would subscribe to servers/instances specifically, without any cross instance caching. That way you will only see what you want to see, and if an instance gets overloaded they have to scale up, but won't bring down your whole browsing in the meantime. It would be up to the client apps to aggregate all your instances/feeds to show you a list to doomscroll through, but you would have one account (activity pub compatible) to subscribe to them all with. If there were private, invite only communities for piracy then it wouldn't legally jeopardize the rest of them either. I keep chipping away at it. One day I'll publish is.

Yeah, it really can't be helped. The piracy community can always just shut down and congregate elsewhere. It's significantly harder for a more general community to scatter and reform.

Yeah... Shit I guess that will be my first sub on my Lemm.ee account

Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

Maybe I didn't have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.

Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it's the largest server, with the most users. 🙄

Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn't stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating

It wasn’t the largest when some of us joined…

Is there an automated way to move my account and all content to another instance?

What a snarky thing to say

Maybe you shouldn't even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

To give credit where it's due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.

Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.

It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.

Maybe literally any other instance at all could have not completely glitched out when I tried to sign up back in June.

Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.

I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you're going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it's an unfair battle from the start.

I can't blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There's a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it's protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.

yeah, a decentralized link aggregator just works!

If you are hosting a discussion forum on a server that you are responsible for, does that automatically make you responsible for the content that people post on it? Even an instance the size of dbzer0 is impossible for a single person to moderate all of the content from the many communities that are federated with it. Impossible.

That's like saying the admin of lemmy.world holds all of the wild political opinions that are posted on there.

Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.

Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.

EDIT: The post in question in case others haven't seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.

True but it hosted in Germany. That country does not take it easy on piracy...

Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.

I mean if you support illegally hosted material you can be forced to take down your website. As much as it sucks, piracy is illegal. Anyways, they haven't defederated, just blocked that community.

i myself switched away from lemmy.world due to how unstable it is, glad i did so.

Thank you for your work!

I just don't like the idea of having 500 accounts after it's all said and done, especially if most of them wind up being unused... unless I'm fundamentally doing something wrong by creating a new account on every instance I want to use?

I feel a little better about it if lemmy provided migration tools.

It certainly not the end of the world but it is kind of a pain in the ass.

Reddit has plenty of piracy communities, being more strict than reddit is is just unnecessary

The only thing it's serious about is being a decentralized platform - if you want to access something, then choose an instance who'se admins are serious about being heavily censored.

It's the old adage of "if you don't like something, do something about it"

The fediverse gives you the tools and ability to surf the fediverse how you want, all through decentralization. Don't like the rules on one instance? Move, simple as that.

It's the same context of "vote with your wallet" - only put your accounts and time into instances you want to put your account on and only donate to instances you want to donate to, vote with your time and money, that's how we can make this platform better, for ourselves and for others.

It's not censorship, it's just smart people protecting themselves from liability. Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.

Not like you can't access their community anymore

1. It's not censorship, it's a liability/legal issue.

2. This isn't "the fediverse", it's a single instance.

3. You can move to a dedicated piracy instance or start your own.

They banned the shrooms community too. So glad I never volunteered to help these people..

but only if you know enough about the fediverse to be aware; if i had no logged into like i usually don't do on these days, i would never know and spend the rest of my time on lemmy.world trying to figure out why i can't find any pirating stuff to share.

Is there an automated way to move my account and all content to another instance?

Sync. I come from Reddit and that's what my favorite client defaults to. It's not optimal, because of the reason you say. I am totally OK with new apps presenting users with an easy "one-click" choice of instance to make onboarding easy, but having one accepted default has this side effect. If I were to maintain a Lemmy app, I'd probably select the "default" instance for a new user by selecting one at random in an array of popular instances, and then offer the user to subscribe to the official community of my app (wherever instance it's on) to keep up. Maybe I can hit up the dev with some feedback on this on the official community.

And now, just like it ended up with Mastodon, I'll have to maintain multiple accounts for Lemmy. Such a good user experience, it will totally catch on…

Seriously. Accept this piece of criticism from someone new to the Fediverse. Being harsher on piracy than a fucking corporation and forcing users to migrate accounts left and right / have multiple accounts to be able to easily access content out of your Mastodon instance's niche and having to get around your instance defederating and blocking content you wanted to see is just abysmal UX. Are we supposed to have our content scattered around how many accounts? And for those who don't like mobile apps, at this point I can only use Sync (Lemmy) and Tusky (Mastodon) through my phone to browse the Fediverse for lack of a good option to maintain multiple accounts on desktop. Firefox containers are just overkill for this, but I welcome suggestions.

End rant, and sorry if it's a long-winded disorganized ramble. Is lemmy.ml good to get around this block?

Sadly its a major case of "But all my stuff is here"

For one, my chosen server disappeared without any sign in a puff of logic, so I'm back here

My first two home instances disappeared

Devil's advocate, all content is replicated onto federated instances, the admins of Lemmy.world may be afraid of legal repercussions in their country for technically hosting such content. Personally, I don't think merely discussing piracy will get them in trouble, but their instance, their call.

But that's the beauty of the Fediverse, you just migrate your account to another instance that isn't afraid of repercussions or doesn't have repercussions in their hosting country. There are a few easy to use migration tools out there.

On reddit you didnt even have the option to join a new community if it was banned or blocked. This is a better alternative

People can talk about piracy all they want here it seems. It's when folks start giving very direct advice about how and where to do stuff that things turn into a legal grey area for websites. It also helps to not blow up a great source by sharing it all over the internet for the feds and ignorant people to easily find.

I've been on the internet for a long time. Back in my day, we just referred to the where as "the usual places." Seems that's not the norm anymore.

No, it won't. Only those little bits.

Because that's how the fediverse works.

You should like... not be so quick to call people ignorant. Especially when you're displaying a lot of ignorance as to how this entire setup works.

"I'm a free speech absolutist" - everyone who isn't a free speech absolutist, especially when it costs them nothing.

If the server isn't hosting pirated content they have nothing to be concerned about.

this tankie narrative seems overblown.

i've created an account the day the api changes was announced and i've never seen any political discussions around communism. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but i've seen far more complaining about tankies than tankies themselves

like reddit, if you avoid all and just subscribe to the communities you're interested in then there's no problem.

My friend self hosts an instance that we use. I'd recommend anyone with the ability to self host or join a smaller instance. Good luck friend!

again, this why i claim that lemmy is not the solution to the problem we are trying to solve.

Come to Lemmy.ca, even if you're not Canadian. It's been very stable so far, and the admins are nice.

So join one of the smaller instances rather than the big ones. The big ones have been around a while long before the Reddit exodus for a reason, and that reason is because the people that were kicked out of the likes of Reddit already (so there must have been pretty awful), and needed somewhere to go. Inevitably you're going to find that when you use those instances, you have to put up with these prats.

Come to lemmy.ca so far I am satisfied.

They don't care about people using it, they might even personally do it themselves.

It's about reducing their liability, which this does just fine

This isn't an example of Streisand effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information. It is named after American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project's photograph of her cliff-top residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to the photograph in 2003.

(I needed a lesson myself)

Reddit has a legal team. Rudd is just a random hobbiest with a day job.

Yeah but check out the difference in the community rules, that's why.

Yup, this is why I joined and donated to dbzer0 and not lemmy.world. Hosting lemmy is not enough, it's critical to also protect free speech and open access to information.

The instance wasn't defederated. Just the community blocked.

Why does no one understand that the admins don't want the instance to be shut down and they don't want to be arrested????

I am very pro-piracy, but I would never host a piracy community because I don't want to be freaking jailed. Governments view those that host piracy and piracy communities much more harshly than random participants.

Is everyone on this website 12 years old and not understanding of real world consequences???

I don't understand why everyone is so shocked they did it. Hosting information on pirating stuff is a lightning rod for lawsuits and Lemmy.world is large enough to actually get noticed.

I'm only surprised it took them that long to block it.

Because most communities are desert lands. Niche communities can't grow enough without lemmy going mainstream

The content is still on Reddit. That's why we want to grow.

Unless those communities were sharing links to pirated content. If it was just talk about piracy and piracy news then I don't think that's a good reason to defederate.

Reddit has the money to fight a legal battle. Volunteers running a site off donations do not. They don't want to take risks and that's understandable

Problem isn’t Lemmy.world, it’s the DDOS kiddies attacking whatever instance hosts the most popular communities. Other instances are just as vulnerable.

This is already like that now, they had their own instance from the start.

There are no downloads on dbzer0, it's a discussion community but go off I guess.

Tool to move subscriptions from one instance to another:

https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate

1. install python
2. download the code
3. update the config file
4. run an export then an import

@mintycactus

Dude, you're on lemmy.ml which censors your words. Try to write 'bitch' for example, you can't. You also can't read it, it will show as removed (only for lemmy.ml users).

No illegal content, including sharing copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the owner(s).

The problem is this is still pretty vague. The communities that were blocked weren't sharing copyrighted material, but resources for finding and sharing said material. You might think this is being overly literal but I'm pretty sure it's the same loophole that allows reddit to host r/piracy without getting into legal trouble.

On the other hand, if we take this rule at face value it could be interpreted as not allowing the sharing of any kind of content without the express permission of the creators.

So it's not an issue of people being lazy or ignorant, but overly broad/vague rules

That would require people to read what they sign up for

I just used that lasim tool and it worked perfectly.

Not legal reasons. They explicitly said it's to protect lemmy.world users duh. Enjoy extra protection!

Why not join the actual instance the community is from?

As an administrator of many different public-facing services I'm always going to defend other admins right to moderate their services in whatever manner makes them comfortable, even if I don't agree with their decision.

Eh

The communities discuss piracy, not host the content. They are two different things.

The user that requested it was a troll account create dhours before. The same user then went on to create a transphobic community and post hate. Not the sort of person the admins should be knee jerking to.

Nothing. It's just 3 communities on dbzero that are blocked and as far as I know, they're only blocked on .world. There's no defederation so you as a user signed up to dbzero can still participate in any .world community and any .world user can still interact with communities on dbzero apart from the three named.

It's literally better for everyone to be more spread out, including Lemmy.world.