Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord [update]
This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It's about how the admins informed their users.
A week ago Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. This wasn't very well received (about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements). The comments on that post were turned off, presumably to avoid backlash.
Before that, announcements about the instance used to be posted to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world. This time, the information was posted on the Discord server instead.
I don't agree with this. Having to use a proprietary platform to participate in an open-source one goes against the very purpose for me, especially when the new solution isn't really an improvement (as before the information about the platform was closer to it).
Edit: Corrected the announcements community name.
Update: Lemmy.world finally released an announcement and promised they would inform about similar actions and gather feedback in advance in future.
I agree 100%. If they are going to make an announcement about lemmy.world, they need to do it on lemmy.world. We're not all on the Discord. I, for one, don't want to be.
Discord is not something that is easily indexable or linkable. Which means you have to rely on other people if you aren't part of it. This is a huge issue as anything can be faked
Or secondarily I'd say Mastodon. They have an account but never post anything there.
Yeah seems like the mastodon account would make a lot of sense as a kind of quick and dirty feed of information, particularly when it comes to stuff that's less "announcement" oriented. Like up down or performance issue statuses and the like.
They tried to. It was down at the time though.
How would they make a post about a lemmy.world outage on lemmy.world
It wasn't about an outage.
One of the original intentions of posting somewhere else was about outages.
Something like "we are down so much come read about it live over at ..."
Okay, but that's not what this is about.
"why did lemmy.world mods start posting things to a discord group?" Is the implied point of the thread we are in.
Acknowledged that THIS post by them was regarding defederating the piracy group.
No, that is not the implied point. This is specifically about announcing blocking communities and instances. No one expects lemmy.world to announce it's down on itself.
Hence they created a discord to provide up to the moment updates on features/changes of lemmy.world.
You really don't get this and I'm not going to spend any more time holding your hand through it.
Bro,
Discord created to provide up to the moment outage/stability updates.
Discord used in this instance to provide up to the moment defederation updates.
It's like, mostly the same words.
I acknowledged the use case is different and explained the reasoning they chose that platform.
Simple stuff.
You still don't get it. You clearly don't want to. But your ego-stroking has been noted.
Don't act like you're some dominant figure here, it's very toxic.
we disagree, and you are purposefully pretending I'm typing in wingdings or something.
Lemmy does not provide what they needed, and they justified their actions. If people don't like it, that's fine, but to suggest they mindlessly acted is purposefully missing the point because people aren't happy with them.
It's BS to not announce, on lemmy.world something that affects lemmy.world.
Be open and transparent.
I don't like that you blocked the piracy communities but I recognise that you see a reason to do so.
I've already begun migrating my subs to another instance because that's the great thing about the fediverse - I can.
If you want to be the big Lemmy instance with a lot of traffic then you're going to have to protect yourself, I get it. But at least have the balls to announce your unpopular decisions.
I happened to catch a message on Matrix from @ruud@lemmy.world that he didn't like the way mentions work when you're offline and lots of messages build up, but I didn't realize that meant discord was replacing matrix, especially for community notices.
Add me to the list of folks who won't use discord.
Discord is pretty much against everything the open web is about. Closed source and proprietary protocols... Probably tons of data mining of users as well.
Not even probably, there is.
Probably? Nah, they legit advertise what their users do. Seemingly increasingly so.
Discord has "drops" (in beta for over a year now to be fair as it wasn't super popular), aka the status snippet that shows when and what app you're using gets shared with developers. Basically, what you do on your system gets logged. You can opt out of that, of course, but still they do collect it. Pretty sure they also stored calls and screen recordings at some point (for convenience reasons of course), but there are now too many users for that. At least, I think they no longer do that. But every single thing you type into discord is logged and can be traced back to you with perfect accuracy.
Awaiting the fall of discord once it goes full anti consumer
I can’t believe some subreddits migrated to discord in protest over third party apps when discord will ban you if you try to use 3rd party apps.
Wait what? Why does it ban you if you use third party applications to use it?
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-Automated-user-accounts-self-bots-
Including the parts you type out and don't post.
I'm really not happy with using Discord at all for any organisation open to outside users. We got Lemmy for posts about, well, Lemmy. We got something like Mastodon for external updates.
Use what is there.
Also there is Matrix as a direct federated replacement for discord. No reason not to use it.
EDIT: After doing a bit more digging, it's not running on activitypub so not compatible wit the fediverse, but it does run on a federated model.
Although given that both are open protocols, it should in theory be possible to write an adaptor or an update to make them compatible.
EDIT 2:
nope lolEdit 3: idk why I let myself be mislead and I don't remember what I looked up, but Matrix specifically says it is federated: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
Matrix is not part of the fediverse. I don't know where people got this idea, but I keep seeing it mentioned on Lemmy. It's just a decentralized messaging software
After looking into it, it is federated but not activitypub, so it may not technically be part of the fediverse.
Edit: i did a bad job researching this, but this is true to the best of my knowledge.
It is federated though? It's literally the first sentence in their specification: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
Okay that's a better source than whatever I was reading. I should get off the internet for now. I am too tired.
It's decentralized, not federated. They are slightly different concepts
With Matrix (at least as far as I understand), if you aren't logged in when the message is posted you can't actually decrypt it. I think Matrix would actually be worse than Discord for an announcement like this.
This is wrong. I’m on matrix both on my computer and phone. If I’m not logged in, and conversations are made during that time I can log in and it decrypts all the messages letting you pick up where you left off.
Not sure what I did wrong then but that was my experience
It might have something to do with the channel admin, I’m not sure as I don’t run my own matrix channel, I only know that’s how it works for me. Also the only encrypted channel that I see on my matrix account is the dm’s. The regular channels I’m on are not encrypted and it states as much in the text bar where you type
It's possible that the Matrix server you were on was/is having issues then. I've been running my own instance for over two years now and have not experienced this. I can even login to a new device, verify my session, and then view the history for every channel I've ever been in (encrypted or not).
Just recently started using it. This is the way it has worked since I started. And that just in the last 2 months
That sounds broken to the point of absurdity. Where did you hear that?
I think OP is mixing up IRC and Matrix. IRC indeed does require you to be online to receive messages (but there are ways around that), but matrix loads your messages offline just fine.
Checked it now and I have 3k unread messages on the lemmy support chart.
That's also how IRC works and most chat platforms are heavily inspired by IRC, unless you use a program (bouncer) that kept you online 24/7. I assume there must be something similar for Matrix
One of many reasons people left IRC for Discord.
I didn't hear it, I experienced it. /shrug
This is not true at all. I'm using Element, a matrix client and I'm part of lots of communities. I check it a few times per week and of course i can see all messages.
Install Element and join a server and you will see. It's actually pretty nice.
Yeah I mean, LW using discord instead of a FOSS option is not a good look...
Got banned recently from their Discord server by [I'm assuming] me calling out their announcement/decision a clownery (which it actually is, because why make a announcement community when you're not informing your userbase), ngl it's mildly infuritating..
What even is not a good look is I didn't really receive a notice that I got banned there...
Edit: phrasing
I'm assuming the reason would've been trolling. Considering the bottom of this is all you did and didn't put a statement like "I don't agree with this channel, I think it's uncalled for" etc etc. although even that I would put into !support@lemmy.world
Just tagged a channel and said clownery with no activity in the discord really. Just wanted to add the additional context here and figured a SS would help too.
Why would I be active in the DC when its supposedly purpose was announcements about the site and whenever this site is down? Why would you assume/expect people join in a DC server to interact?
Could you please clarify your source, the discord post as OP mentioned doesn't read that. Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. And if you looked around the main purpose isn't focused around announcements. It seems there was miscommunication and it wasn't posted to lemmy, mistakes happen.
That is sort of the point of Discord as a instant message community platform.
I joined the discord because:
The internal lemmy direct messages sucks.
I already use discord anyways.
It's a great way to not spam unrelated comments. etc
Why did you join?
Making announcements to somewhere you have to log in to see is the problem. You can't see Discord chats unless You're logged in.
There is a lot of FOSS stuff communicating over twitter... Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter account.
But lemmy.world should primarily communicate via lemmy imo...
That's where I'm at. Discord isn't the issue for me, it's them not using their own platform to communicate major announcements. At that point it's like you've given up on your own platform.
I find the same attitude holds for developers who like to hang out in real-time Matrix chat and don't seem to use Lemmy itself very much and things like code blocks ruining greater-than and less-than slip right into release without much concern.
Because Linus Torvalds doesn't care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It's why his kernel is still on GPL2.
This makes no sense to me. Did they provide a reason for choosing Discord of all things? What was wrong with making announcements on Lemmy? Why wouldn't they choose to make announcements in another federated format in addition and not instead of lemmy? Like, I'm not super tech savvy but I'm sure they could set up an RSS-like feed to send out alerts? IDK
With my very limited understanding of it, I believe Discord was something mostly for "as we are down so much, you can get updates here if we are down".
But still, why pick a proprietary platform?
I guess cause it is entirely separate from Lemmy, so can act as a different option.
Also it's real time posting ( like a chat, not a post) and many people already have it.
As a secondary, it's not a bad choice.
What would you recommend?
Another Lemmy instance would also get ddosed
Yeah, this is where I am. I'm a .world person, and I honestly think the admins have been doing a good job generally. I'm not a real Discord person, but I joined theirs after it was recommended a few times. Like you, I think using it as a backup because of the ddos attacks taking them down so much is reasonable, but they should use c/announcements as the primary communication venue. Note that there are a number of people on it who really seem to be enjoying the real time chat, and some even using the voice chat option, so it seems to be serving some people, at least.
I also think they made a potentially understandable mistake on blocking these communities, which I said at length in that thread. I'm inclined to think one issue with the overall Lemmy paradigm is that we have a lot of hobbiests as admins - people who may not have much experience with that, who don't have legal teams, and who might be gun shy about any potential litigation. We can't expect any person who decides to run a Lemmy instance on their laptop to have much feel for what content they're liable for and what's completely safe, so stuff in the grey area is going to make some people squeamish.
Matrix
At this point they should just make a new instance for their announcements lol
Maybe they wanted something off Lemmy so that the attackers can't target both the main and the backup, with the same system.
Isn't this where Mastodon.world kind of comes into play? Off Lemmy but still a federated service, can even pop whatever LemmyWorld status account there in to one's RSS readers or whatever.
Um.... @mwadmin@mastodon.world
@woelkchen Hi, I am on holiday so not sure what the question is about exactly, but announcements are done on Lemmy and when we're down you could check the status page. Discord is not for that.
Even having the Discord server is kind of weird in and of itself I thought, you're using one social media platform to talk about your own Social media platform. I use Discord, so it's whatever, but wouldn't it make sense to keep it within the Fediverse and put a "backup" communication channel on some other instance/service like Mastodon? I guess it helps in situations where lemmy.world goes down. I've just found myself liking Discord less and less when companies use it to make "official" announcements and end up leaving alot of people in the dark, since Discord doesn't seem terribly user-friendly for storing long-term information.
You can find it if you know where to look and you have a dedicated announcements channel, I just don't particularly like the format myself personally. I think my biggest problem with it is that the notification settings are so bad by default that it always feels like I'm getting inundated with notifications as soon as I join a server, so I just mute everything on a channel. I only want personal communications through Discord, I don't particularly care to see "official" communications coming out of it.
I mean, I can see it if it was used as a backup, but yeah, using it as a primary way of communicating with people is kind of weird.
I mean, I do get it to some extent.
As an admin myself, every time I make a post on lemmy aimed at members of my instance, it gets drowned out by folk from other instances that want to offer their thoughts and opinions.
That being said, Discord is not the answer to that problem...
If the intention is to have an internal, instance-only post, I believe such a thing could be enforced with an automoderator bot. I had a lot of success throwing the Lemmy API into an AI and generating my own moderator bot from that. Could work for you.
That's quite a good idea. Not the perfect solution, but better than anything I'm currently using
I had an idea about this today but I don't know enough about Lemmy to confirm it. Thought I'd run it by you just in case.
Could you create a post and lock it normally, then directly edit the postgres row to unlock the post? I'm wondering if this would federate the lock but not federate your unlock causing all outside users to see a lock and all internal users see an unlocked post.
Possible edge case: users who subscribe to the community after the unlock will receive the initial data dump of posts and this will include the post in its current unlocked state.
However, this would be an easy way to block the majority commenting on a post while maintaining a seemless experience for your internal users.
Now that is an interesting idea! Will have to give that a try
What is the problem with getting down votes ? Visibility? I thought Lemmy supported pinned posts.
I'm not sure I follow. Where do downvotes come in to it?
I misread drowned as downvoted. 🤣
They do. Personally, I think it makes the most sense, in regards to instance news like this, to put a pinned and locked post on the actual platform you're talking about, and then put a discord or matrix or whatever off-site link in the body of the post for those who wish to discuss. That's what a lemmy.zip admin did recently, and I think it worked well.
You mean just like a specific recent post on our main about defederating another instance being drowned out by members of said instance :)
“I said beetlejuice three times and now he’s here ruining my life!”
Sh.itjust.works uses matrix like any normal lemmy instance would.
Why should announcements happen in a real time chat anyway? Lemmy is actually best suited for announcements.
Indeed. But if there must be a chat, it should be matrix. But I've read it sucks for moderation.
Well, I doubt there must be a public chat in the first place, especially when it kind of serves as a competition to the *.World products. Some form of private chat between admins: sure. Public: IMO no.
Matrix is a piece of hot garbage on the UX front. Maybe when Matrix stops sucking so hard it can take matter out of galactic core black holes it can be taken seriously as a platform.
Very reddit of them?
Coins incoming! :)
Just kidding. So much drama, needs some comic relief and this is all I had.
This gives out the impression they don't care about lemmy being open source and decentralized but rather they are at it for a piece of the cake
By running a server on donations and barely breaking even? I'm not sure I'm following the logic here, this isn't a corporate controlled website beholden to board members and advertisers
I couldn't agree more. We shouldn't need to be somewhere else to receive announcements (especially such important ones).
Not to mention Discord's horrible record of privacy and security. I don't have an account and will never make one, and I'm sure many others in the fediverse will agree.
I actually just tested out the account making process, and I got asked for my phone number. No. Way.
We're here because we care about a decentralized, open network. Aside from its confusing and busy UX, it's not even indexable. Discord is literally a black hole for information and terrible for everyone except for Discord itself, who is doing who knows what with all of our data.
Discord is everything the fediverse stands against.
This whole situation is rubbing me the wrong way. I can understand the motives behind defederating even if I don’t agree but it’s been a day and the only announcement is still on Discord. Not ideal.
Discord is cancer, and FOSS communities should avoid it like the plague. It's everything that is against foss philosophy.
They needed to post it on a site that can stay up for more than 24 hours at a time.
It would definitely make more sense to post the announcements on Lemmy rather than another discord server.
IMHO, Rather than dividing the stream of new information it would be better to focus on one platform.
Personally I dislike discord as the conversations there are too fast for me.
Same. I never really liked how it’s used for discussion purposes because the conversation format doesn’t work there, especially if tons of people are chatting at the same time.
They could have gotten feedback if the comments were not turned off. I'll give the benefit of the doubt there's a good reason to not have comments on for that post but that and using Discord is two orange flags.
The moment I learned about defederation, I made an account on an instance that didn't do that.
Here's a website you can use to check what your instance is blocking.
https://fba.ryona.agency/
Alternatively if you scroll to the bottom page of any individual lemmy instance there should be a link called Instances which will take you to a page of all the instances yours is federated and defederated with.
Oh neat I didn't know that.
can you recommend a good instance with a no defederation policy?
An instance with no defederation policy is going to end up exactly like an instance with no moderation policy. It's going to become Voat or whatever the latest far-right website is these days.
You might be better served to seek out an instance with a transparent defederation policy, and admins that use it as a tool of last resort, instead of first resort. I was, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression that lemmy.world fit that bill, but maybe not so much.
This isn't true, I think. You can have an instance that federates with nearly everyone but which still has a higher standard for behavior for its own users. This way, users on such an instance can see all the problematic instances but are not permitted to be problematic themselves. It's an option.
(Even still, I think you'd find yourself de-federating from someone eventually for spam or other technical reasons if not due to objections over content.)
It's a problem of scale. If you don't defederate from a racist-focused instance (for example; hypothetically speaking), then you need to devote resources to moderating those users who make racist comments, as allowed by their instance, but directed at your users. Sure, you could do this, but it's probably smarter to just defederate and save the resources for other uses. And no moderation team is going to be flawless, so racism will still creep in and be missed by the mod team.
It might be a different story if users are given the tools to block entire instances (like kbin has) but even then I think the ROI would be low.
That's incorrect. Mods need to moderate the content hosted on their OWN instance. Not stop the people on their instance from having access to outside information.
I think one of us doesn't understand federation-- and to be clear, it might be me.
This is my understanding:
Every instance is like an email server and every account is like an email address. I'm NAME@lemmy.sdf.org and you're NAME@lemmy.world. I think where people (and I used to) get confused is with how Communities play into this. Both of our instances have a "cats" community. And we both can see and post to each others "cats" communities. Our community could have a rule that also allows dogs, and your community could prohibit dogs. So, when you post you have to follow the rules of the community that you're on, and those rules could be influenced by the instance admins themselves. So, kind of like how subreddits operate. So, the instance and the community moderators can control the content that is hosted on their own instance. So, you can have an instance that moderates only what's happening on their own server, and that's it.
Now, if lemmy.world decides to de-federate from lemmy.sdf.org, then as far as you can see, the other "cats" community doesn't exist, I don't exist, I can't communicate with you, and you can't with me. And the only reason you would do this is to make the moderating job easier. If you want, you can disconnect from from every other lemmy instance and then you don't have to worry about outside people coming in and having to also moderate what they say on your forum, but then it changes from being an open forum to just being a "friend group".
Also, I think the problem of "reddit supermods" is repeating. Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are the two largest instances and at this point if they choose to de-federate from a smaller instance, it can basically kill that instance. And it can also be used to control the narrative. There are a few people making choices for many.
You can block users and communities yourself. Go sort by "All" and start blocking everything you don't want to see again. After a short time your feed will be cleared up.
I thought we were discussing defederation. You cannot block entire instances on lemmy, that I know of.
Blocking a community does not block the users of the instance. The type of people that would naturally gravitate to, for example, a far right instance of lemmy.
I know you can't block an instance as a user. I understand why you would want to. It would make things easier for us and I think it would be a good feature to add on the user side. Or perhaps an "opt in" to a block list that is kept by your instance.
In my opinion, blocking the individual users and instance communities is good enough for now. If a problematic member of another instance starts causing trouble in a community on your instance, then I believe it's the job of the moderators to block them if they're breaking the community rules, and outside of that it's my own job to block individuals I don't like.
It’s also likely to get into legal issue. I like sdf but the fact they aren’t defederating from the pedophile instance is really really bad.
Which instance is that?
Lemmy.sdf.org they are a very very very old internet tech focused community that’s been since the late 80s. They’ve been pretty much everywhere on the internet as it’s grown
I think they meant which instance is the pedophile one haha
I know what sdf is, what is the pedophile instance you're referring to?
Ah my bad. I don't really feel comfortable saying their name completely openly because they are very aggressive to any and all people who point that out, but they allow loli/shotacon and attract a lot of open pedophiles. Wont say the name outright, but if you go to https://lemmy.world/instances and scroll down to "blocked" and look at the first one, that's it. Do not go to that instance. I'm serious, the content they host is illegal in many jurisdictions.
Not at all. I mean maybe if you only look at the local feed. But this is the Fediverse, I can still see every other instance.
I don't need anyone choosing for me what I should and should not see. I can (and do) do that myself, thank you.
I see this a lot, and first off, it's not true at the instance level, for lemmy-- unless there's a new option I didn't see. Second, having to block someone that suggests you should die for your skin color, after reading the comment, is not without harm. There is value in preventing the speech from being seen at all, versus blocking people after the fact.
It's obviously a generalization, but generally the people who say "just block them" are also people that haven't lived with systemic bigotry directed at them for their entire lives.
And for the record, I don't think piracy falls into this category of speech.
I promise it is true. I've been doing it for months.
Speak for yourself. Doesn't harm me.
You haven't been blocking instances with Lemmy because that option doesn't yet exist.
What do you mean? Are you saying that because you aren't affected that no one can be?
Again, yes, I have.
...no. I said the opposite of that.
How do you block a whole instance in Lemmy?
Depends on your client
Ah I think Connect allows it? Is there any other?
Voyager
I don't know if it's their policy, but it's against the spirit of the organization. This is where I'm at: lemmy.sdf.org
I actually saw it on this list: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances You can look at their list and find instances that show 0,0 for BI,BB (blocked instances, blocked by).
I've found there is a culture within Lemmy developers and long-time operators to discuss in Discord or Matrix chat instead of "eating their own dogfood" and using Lemmy itself to openly discuss Lemmy technical and project issues. These chat services are legendary for keeping things away from search engines and newcomers getting up to speed. Lemmy itself isn't nearly as search-engine friendly as Reddit was traditionally, it seems like feedback needs to be given as to how important it is to keep things about Lemmy in the eyes of those who actually use Lemmy...
I think Discord is great, as long as you account for its shortcomings:
I love how snappy it is (I never have to wait minutes for messages to load, as I do in Matrix), and also how there are a ton of Lemmy users who have Discord open in the background anyway. While I wouldn't ever propose moving something like the main Lemmy communication channels to Discord, I do think it's much easier to have IMs with regular Lemmy users on Discord than it is to do so on Matrix (as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed).
By the way, lemm.ee also has a Discord server. It's only treated as a secondary channel, all announcements are posted in our meta community on Lemmy itself, and just linked to from Discord, but it's still nice to have IMO.
I understand your point, but by that logic, we should use Reddit rather than Lemmy, as most users are there. It's not only about ease of use, it's about being sure users won't be abused. Discord is still in its acquisition phase, but you can be sure enshitification will come next.
I like discord as a communication platform (as long as you keep the spying in mind) as the devs truly believe in their product and as such have created something truly amazing. It will be a sad day when the enshitification phase begins. It somehow hasn't yet which is very shocking in all honesty. Guess that nitro revenue still more than makes up for the dev and hosting costs.
The issue people are having is the announcement was made exclusively in lemmy.worlds discord server. Beehaw has a discord server as well, but they relay announcements to there, not from there usually
And for those that don't know (most of you probably do), this (sunarus) is the main/head/founding admin of lemm.ee (and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).
I think not a substantial contributor yet, but I hope to become one eventually 😃
Even assuming my ancient Discord login still works (didn’t they make everyone change their names or something? idk if that affects accounts) it doesn’t look like you can use it on a phone without downloading the app, and I’m not doing that just to check for Lemmy announcements. Discuss controversial decisions there if you have to, but announce them here first.
You can use the web app on phone but it's a pain in the ass to get to without it redirecting you to the app/app store.
There actually is a mobile web version, if you go to https://discord.com/app
Ah, that's good to know. Thanks.
This is disappointing because thus far, I have been really happy with the communication and transparency of lemmy.world. But with this change, I will unfortunately not see announcements anymore.
There's admin drama now. Oh boy Lemmy really is busy like reddit.
I left lemmy.world because they were doing nonsense like this. I recommend to others doing the same.
I can't even verify if this was posted on their site.
Thanks for raising the issue.
Most probably, people who made that decision are not aware of the implications and made that choice in good faith, so it's worth giving reasons why you want them to avoid proprietary software, rather than just frowning at them.
To the admins of lemmy.world and anyone who feels confuse about why this is an issue : it is about freedom. You all know how Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are turning ugly, and you can't do anything about it. With FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), when it turns ugly, you can do something about it. You (or any technical person who agrees with you) can take the code and go your own way with it (we call that "forking"). No decision of the authors can be forced upon you. Similarly, if you think something is not working right, you can fix it yourself, and send the changes to the maintainers of the code, who usually are happy to get some help. So it's also about freedom of fixing your own problems, instead of waiting and praying the authors do something about it.
And this is the whole spirit of the Fediverse : taking matters in our own hands instead of being betrayed once more by a company which decides that their bottom line requires to be user hostile. One day, this will happen to Discord to, it always ends up there. That's why people using Lemmy who are aware of those problems are not happy with seeing lemmy.world use Discord.
Thanks to the admins of lemmy.world for all the work they provide to the Fediverse.
Wonder who bought them out. Behind the scene money is always an issue with sell outs.
Why would someone buy a lemmy instance at this moment? Does anyone care?
Lemmy.world Admins should concentrate more on keeping their instance up and running. They could have used someone else instance to release announcement. Most of these people are IT support guys, not the brightest bunch. They do a hell stressful job for mere 100-150k. I personally know IT support guys who got stroke and was off from work for 9 months.
A single community was blocked due to a legal issue. It can be unblocked once the legal ramifications are resolved.
Legal ramifications in what way? And do we know that there was a dialog about this with the community mods? The one I looked at has rules against directly linking to infringing content, so it seem-- at least from where I'm sitting-- that blocking would not be an appropriate first step, instead opening a dialog with the mods/admins to moderate any offending content.
And, in case it needs saying-- US copyright law is not global copyright law, and discussing copyright infringement is not illegal.
Though, more to the point, this kind of poor communication-- if not the actions themselves-- makes me wonder if I should move to a new instance. I don't want to, but I also don't want admins making decisions without communicating them to the userbase, whether I personally agree with the decision or not. It certainly doesn't give the impression of transparency.
There wasn't any specific legal issue from what I know. This was triggered by a butthurt transphobic troll who got banned in lemmy.dbzer0.com and then opened the call to defed. Then lemmy.world preemptively blocked the pirate communities, just in case
The image cache on the LW server is a likely reason for the legal issues.
I truly don't mean to be dense, but I don't follow. We're talking about piracy, right? What images are of concern there, and why does the first step to resolving it have to be blocking instead of communication?
Federated servers are cached on other Federated servers. That is how you can see LW on another instance even when it is being DDOSed. It looks like LW removed the cache for that one community and blocked it from being saved on their server.
I get that, but what images would be of concern in a piracy-focused community?
Apparently this.
I believe it’s not images in particular but the overall cached content from the community on .world servers. Since lemmy works by caching content so you browse that content on your home instance instead of the actual source instance where the community resides, your instance may be liable for “hosting” that content. So anything posted there like direct torrent links or whatever will also be on .world servers. Of course the piracy communities have rules that forbid direct sharing of files and links, so maybe they’re just being overly cautious in case mods/admins aren’t quick with enforcing community rules.
I’m not defending them, just attempting to explain their (probable) rationale.
For me, it's not that the community was blocked. That is the prerogative of lemmy.world admins. My problem is it wasn't announced here, it was only announced on Discord. That feels like they don't respect us as users of their community unless we're that deeply invested.
It wasn't announced anywhere. I'd wait and see what is announced. If the admins were served they might not legally be able to talk about it yet.
OP claims the opposite.
Anyone that has seen this discord post knows there is a lot more to it than what was posted here.
That's sort of the point.
Here's the announcement for anyone who wants to see I guess
Not all of us are simps for media conglomerates and publishers
So you want servers shut down and admins arrested?
That's not the issue op is discussing. At least read their post before commenting.
That is what they are discussing.