This community got removed from lemmy.world (again)

Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 560 points –

This is another post that alerted me of this.

https://lemmy.world/post/13287681

And here is the modlog:

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity

237

Why are people joining .world to begin with? The entire point of this is to decentralize. Joining the by far largest instance beats the entire purpose.

Join smaller ones like lemmy.one, lemmy.club, lemmings.world, lemmy.zip etc. We might need to start specifically recommending against .world and for general purpose instances like those.

Also, funny how even reddit allows r/Piracy but not .world lol

Sync had Lemmy.world as the default instance to register a new account (might still be the case, I'm not sure). One of the factors for sure.

So does Voyager, Raccoon, and Eternity. Everything is just defaulting to it and it's infuriating.

Trying to think of any place that didn't/doesn't default to them

Maybe boost? I'm not certain as I logged my first account on liftoff

The dev really needs to change that then.

Perhaps have a system of selecting randomly from a set of hand-picked general purpose instances at sign-up, where having less people gives it a higher chance of being picked (if it's of at least a certain size of course, to prevent spam etc)

Agree, but easier said than done

I'm a programmer and it really is quite easy to implement lol

The issue is not about the implementation, but the filter: which criteria do you use to select instances that are eligible for the pool of instances? I'm genuinely asking because I think it takes some time to have a look on instances for people to make the best choice.

You're overthinking it. Select a few of the popular ones and be done with it

Why are people joining .world to begin with?

Because how it works when you first join is very confusing, and why you would choose any particular server is not clear at all.

Also, people want to join something that is bigger and more active because it feels like it would be better (more stable, more content, etc.)

In all fairness I applied to 5 Lemmy instances when the Reddit downfall started, including .ca and .world. .ml to date is still the only one to have processed my application. It may have been due to lots of applications at the time but the sheer fact my application is still pending on the other 4 instances leads me to use the one that actually works as opposed to the first one I chose.

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Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It's like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.

Joining the by far largest instance beats the entire purpose.

There's kind of a tension here between Lemmy's design and what makes most people join social media websites. Most people want the biggest, most centralized website.

And instead they get the entire network no matter what instance they sign up for. Well, somewhat less than the entire network, apparently...

(I say this knowing full well how many think they're "on the internet" even though they never leave Meta's corporate web)

Lemmy.world is also notoriously mismanaged and has had dubious privacy issues in the past, such as their Discord situation regarding user messages

dubious privacy issues

They're also federated with threads so I wouldn't be surprised at all. I'm a fool for sticking around in there as long as I have.

If you join a small instance, the chances are higher that it will a) be poorly maintained and b) fold quicker, forcing you to find another instance to join and re-subscribe to all your communities.

so long as you're regularly exporting your profile, moving instances isn't a big deal anymore.

The whole point is most people want simplicity, not a chore.

convenience, freedom, price, safety. Choose 2

For most users, price and convenience. That's been made very clear over and over again.

Sure, but eventually the lack of freedom and security drives them away when the service enshittifies thoroughly.

That's what we like to think. Facebook, Google, kinda shows us most users are perfectly happy to continue taking abuse, though

With social media companies, they seem unassailable, until the trust thermocline is breached, and then they collapse all at once.

Fortunately anyone using Lemmy is likely not one of those "most users"

As lemmy becomes mainstream, those users will become the average user here. Eternal September is just the way of things

I run my own instance that technically does have open registration, but I can't really recommend anyone actually sign up to use it. It's not running on very powerful hardware, and my commitment to keeping it running 24/7 is "as long as it stays convenient and interesting." There are probably many, many of those. But there are a good collection of second and third tier instances now as well, I'm not to worried about .world's popularity so long as they don't do something like switch to a federation allow-list rather than a block list.

If by open registration, you mean without approval, I strongly recommend you add an approval step, due to spam.

I'm aware of the risk, but so far the captcha seems to have prevented any mass sign-up, and none of the few other existing accounts so far have any activity. That said, since I have no intention to support a user base anymore, I probably should close it anyway.

I mean, depending on your costs, running your own instance has benefits of control.

Agreed, and I don't intend to stop at the moment. When I wrote "close it" I meant registration, sorry about the ambiguous language.

Also, don't put all your eggs in one basket: diversify, diversify, diversify. Make a main account, but have more on at least one other instance. Instances go down for maintenance, software gets updated, owners change moderation policies, so on. If you can't get to Lemmy through your main, use your secondary.

Personally I use lemmy.sdf.org as my secondary. It's run by a bunch of retro-enthusiast Unix nerds who more care about the functionality of the tech than anything else. No blocked communities there, and AFAIK they haven't defederated from any instance outside of ones that were hacked/compromised. That does not mean you can just go there and be a shitbird though, they do have standards.

Yeah, I was cool with sitting on lemmy.world until they did something that I wasn't cool with.

I'm not loyal to them, or anyone else. The more choice, the better.

Everyone should leave that instance, the admin and the mods on that instance are big time thought police and will find excuses in their vague rules to delete your posts and eventually ban you if your views go against the grain.

Banning users with certain "opinions" isn't a bad thing on its own, but on .world that grain seems to be the corporate-bootlicking grain of Reddit.

I think it's fine to have a main instance, as long as that main instance isn't gung-ho about censorship like lemmy.world has become.

Although I definitely agree with recommending against joining lemmy.world.

Such a shitty decision by biased mods and useful idiots. They deserve to lose power as a result.

My instance is somewhat small so I'm not guilty :D

Lemmy is confusing enough for people who are not used to its idea. Everybody new and with FOMO immediately went for the bigger instances.

why? because it feels safer to join a big and longer lasting instance than a random one with almost no users. such small instances can vanish from one day to the bext. i once created a account on such a small instance and not even a week later it was wiped from earth, taking my account with it. so it's no wonder people chooser rather bigger instances.

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Just a quick update, lemmy.world has posted an update that explains their decision here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/16795373

TLDR is that the person who removed the community is fairly new to the mod team and didn't realize there was a bit of a history to this situation. Also, looks like they are sticking with the decision this time around though.

Please don't harass the lemmy.world admins/mods though - if you don't like the situation you are free to register here or on another instance. And if you aren't a lemmy.world user, then this doesn't affect you at all.

I'm proud of our community here, and it's their loss, not ours! pirate captain giving the thumbs up

  • updated the link

The translation is, "It wasn't us don't get angry, but also it kind of was one of us and also we are sticking by the decision so it may as well have been us." I don't really see that it matters if the story is true - in the best possible case they're just saying that they don't have a way of setting policies and having those policies be followed.

If we've learned anything from centralised platforms it's that size doesn't protect platforms from the consequences of making bad decisions.

Guess who just created a second account 👍

Would be nice if there was a Firefox extension or something to 'merge accounts' as a workaround. Make things a little easier in situations like this.

The speed that this happened suggests they might have gotten spooked by something. Put down the pitchforks mates and give them a chance to explain first.

EDIT: Welp, I expected an explanation by now...

EDIT2: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/16795373

If there's anything they should be spooked by, it's the pitchforks!

Ill take a pitchfork in the guts any day if it keeps me away from being a debt slave to Disney for the rest of my life.

Don't you guys have an admin chat group. Or at least you guys would have some way of keeping in touch since this has happened before.

We do, in fact. They never gave a heads-up, and none has responded until now. I found about this from this post

Well at least they honored their commitments /s

because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

It's funny because someone on their team started banning people from that thread for disagreeing with their stance then when called out for it they quietly changed the instance bans for community bans, in an awesome display of pure pettiness one would normally see on Reddit.

When I described the previous removal as LW having a feud with dbzer0, that was why.

They've just posted.

It's not a good explanation. The only thing that changed was their own minds.

Wouldn't be surprised if they got some personally delivered letters from the legal department of a big media company, given that they blocked visibility to some magazines on other servers.

.world is just the worst parts of Reddit. Even fucking Reddit hasn't banned r/Piracy (yet)

It definitely has that Front Page feel. I straight up just blocked .world after they took a pro Meta stand.

Why would Reddit ban it? It's an easy way for them to collect users' IP addresses for their corporate overlords.

The optics of a potentially publicly traded company (what ever happened with the Reddit IPO thing?) openly having a "how to steal other companies copyrighted work" forum is more of a negative than IP farming with no method to actually do anything useful with the IP addresses.

I think Reddit would have to tackle the mountains of porn too for those optics.

Porn is less of a legal liability than copyright claims is my guess.

Also... like... if somebody is dumping money into Reddit as a user of Reddit, which is more likely to make them stop: killing the piracy forums or the porn forums?

It's not about the legal liability and more that publically traded corporations only want profit. Reddit would need to cater to advertisers who would not like all the porn, it's why Tumblr and Imgur removed the porn.

Specifically, the executives and shareholders want their Publicly Traded Shares of company stock to be increasing in value. Advertisers are good for getting long term holders of the stock to keep holding and buying, but everybody else is looking to quietly pump up the numbers and sell what they can without upsetting the apple-cart.

I'd bet a shiny metal dollar that after the IPO starts, the porn subs will slowly start being winnowed down. Give it a few years and if any exist they will be private.

Reddit IPO thing?

Planned for this week

Huh. I hadn't thought about that. That's not a bad point either.

It hasn't banned it, but they turned it into a meme community, which can be worse than being banned.

Luckily it doesn't affect anything beyond people who insist on using only one instances (world). Glad to have dbzer0 around.

I have four accounts on the four instances that host communities I am interested in.

It's a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised, but I guess that's the only way federation can really work in practice (especially considering when an instance is blocked user on the blocker side just continue to see it frozen in time, with no warning as to what's going on)

It’s a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised

I think this is precisely what the ActivityPub model of federation promised, actually 😅

I think a solution would be to have instances without communities.

It sucks, but I'm really trying to find instances with the most federation. I'd rather censor things myself than to have some useful idiot do it for me.

"Instance A blocked instance B, so now we have to use instance C to communicate with both." Seems kind of roundabout, which is why I'm looking for the 'ever-C' instance that federates with the most.

I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.

But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.

If you're technical enough you can fight or bypass instance bans/defederation

Good call, I may have to drop the docker into truenas scale one day...

The issue is that depending on where the Instance is located can mean that the person is liable for the content on their instance, or at least some corps will try to take them to court over that.

It would be really nice to have something you've described, but then who hosts the community and becomes liable?

Someone's always going to be liable, that's unavoidable.

I'm just spitballing ideas for how we can always connect to the servers we want to.

@Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com hit the nail on the head. Self-hosting would be the end goal, but it's too much of a hassle for most people to go through.

So a few servers that exist solely to connect with the fediverse would be ideal for those people.

Are the 4 instances defederated from eachother? If they aren't then you could just have 2 accounts

Best play, run your own instance and federate with whoever you want :D

Takes away some of the anonymity though, even with domain registrar obfuscation etc., they'd probably disclose the owner to a request from whatever authority comes knocking. And if you're based in a jurisdiction where piracy is explicitly forbidden, federating with db0 and effectively co-hosting links to prohibited content might open a whole other can of worms. And not everyone is technically competent enough to run and maintain an instance, even if the initial setup works out with one of the how-to's.

and if you're really technical and really want to you can even bypass other people's defederation attempts against you.

Same. Beehaw is my main, but I also have a Kbin account (which I know is technically different), and then a LW account, which I almost never sign into.

Even my Mastodon account is separate. It's fine this way. I don't need everything on one account. With a password manager, it's not like I have to remember passwords anyway.

Sigh.

On the up side, if anyone wants in, they are free to create accounts on other instances

The part that annoys me is that this was done silently even though last time they said they would ask their users. Hopefully it was just an admin that didn't get the last memo.

Edit: the community -> their users

I suspect something involving law enforcement or legal. Still would love if LW admins updated on this.

Indeed, especially with 0.19 that allows you to migrate your subs and block lists in two clicks

Wish that was around when I moved from lemmy.world to lemm.ee some time ago. It would have saved me a bit of time. Nice that it's there for the future, though.

If any admins of lemmy.world are around, I created !westcoastedm@lemmy.dbzer0.com for the explicit reason of sharing copyright protected music. Can you ban it too? Wouldn't want to get you guys in trouble with mommy and daddy.

A few of the bigger instances have been very open about the fact that they're anti-piracy, anti-porn, etc and removing this community is par for the course with such a stance.

What does that mean for the average user? It means there's more incentive to move to better instances. It's when instances have such a monopoly on users and communities that people should not only move, but advocate for other people moving to smaller instances.

Also a major benefit of not being federated by large instances is that there's less surface area for search engines and thus resources last longer.

Imo the issue here is that how Lemmy works right now, or maybe just its apps, seems to have the trend of pushing most people onto the largest instance(s) like .world

If the point of the Fediverse is to have a decentralized userbase, that trend needs to be reversed.

Even if we give .world admins the benefit of the doubt and say they got in legal trouble or something this time, having a userbase properly spread across many instances would prevent that instance from being the obvious target.

imo when the devs get tired of .ml being the second cousin and not the biggest or most well-liked instance, they'll change their website to not surface by size and popularity so much.

Lemmy.world is the stupidest instance around

I don't know, at least its not stuffed up to its assrim with Marxist filth.

Well where the hell else are we supposed to store our Marxist filth?

Instead it's filled with zionazi and anti-piracy filth.

I prefer my filth Marxist and materialist flavoured thank you very much.

I mean, I like my Marxist content to be good and not filth. Maybe that's what he meant.

Says lemm.ee user lmao

What's wrong with lemm.ee?

Probably just using Texas_Hangover's lack of logic against them

Would be a good time to finally leave .world behind. That instance is way too big

I moved to lemm.ee from .world the last time they banned these communities, as a momentarily fix, never cared to look back as here was better managed, no censorship, quicker updates and no noticeable downtimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

me too, enjoy seeing the occasional hexbear, ml, lemmygrad, etc

Honestly, seeing enough of their posts and discussions over the months turned me from left-leaning to a full-blown commie

Did you import your .world data to .ee?

I did with a tool I found in GitHub long ago, I think that is not needed anymore as Lemmy has included a similar tool within the user web page settings.

Oh really? How do I find this?

Same here. They also had issues with downtime around same time.

Yeah, it was very annoying because Lemmy.world was down very often, not their fault in most cases though.

Did this ever get fixed?

They might have. Last post in their announcement community regarding downtime is this one.

Another reason why I like Fediverse

If Lemmy.world would have full control over it, this community would just get banned, but there's more and it is still accessable from all other places

I just left lemmy.world for lemmy.ca

Corporate cucks and their censors can go fuck themselves.

I'm done with that shit.

Welcome to the club, I moved to lemmy.ca since they banned piracy instances for the first time

Sadly lemmy.CA won't be far behind

I'm afraid of that, but hopefully there will be even more alternatives by then.

I'm happy on feddit.de, as they are really only defederated from the tankies and Threads.

I left L.W when they federated with Threads and tried lemm.ee, but dealing with the tankies is so annoying I had to find another new home and settled for feddit.de.

Can't you use lemm.ee and block tankie instances?

feddit.de is still federated with lemmy.ml which is a tankie instance.

Yeah lemmy.ml has gotten worse with tankies, but it's no where near as bad as the others. And I still want to see some lemmy.ml communities (tech, gaming).

But unless it's changed with some of the recent updates, blocking instances as a user (on lemmy) only blocks posts from the instance but still allows interaction with their users in comments of posts. It's different for kbin and mastodon.

I don't want the annoyance of arguing with tankies from their main instances. I'd rather be defederated.

Also, why go back to lemm.ee and do that when I don't need to on feddit.de? That seems kind of silly in the first place.

Yeah, world news is the one to block on lemmy.ml

Edit: Actually fuck it, just block the whole cesspool. Plenty of alternatives to post to.

Did exactly the same thing a while ago. I'm sure at some point I'll also have to make an account on just that instance so I can view it there which is shitty but works.

Communist trolls are a protected class there. As long as you don’t report them, you’ll be fine in .ca

A disunited federation is still a federation.

AFAIK, lemmy.world cannot remove !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com (but block this community or instance), because lemmy.world is another instance.

Pirates interested in this communities will find a way to lurk or participate.

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

lemmy.world stays losing

how does reddit have /r/piracy but lemmy.world doesn't?

lol

.world has one disadvantage: It has to follow the laws of the Netherlands, Finland AND Germany.

So theoretically, if something's legal for the Dutch and Finns but illegal in Germany, it's not ok on .world. I believe it used to be smaller but I think they expanded admin teams? Idk how a single non profit website is somehow beholden to the laws of 3 separate countries.

It would be hilarious if they expanded this further. They add a country where alcohol sale is illegal? Recommendations for cocktails are now against TOS. For all. Add Singapore? Oops, discussing procurement of chewing gum is now against TOS. USA? Kinder Surprise is against TOS.

If we're to have any chance at convincing more Reddit users to join the Fediverse, the main Lemmy and Kbin instances need to stick together. While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn't make for great optics (having a greater variety of communities above the 50k user mark would help bring more users to Lemmy), a fragmented federation only helps Reddit. Beyond that, this community has rules in place to ensure that posts stick to the discussion of piracy, and not piracy itself.

While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn't make for great optics

I'd argue otherwise. It is great optics to have a thriving piracy community. It keeps the corporate boot lickers out, and attracts the kind of crowd that we should want on Lemmy.

While it's great to have a thriving piracy community, it being one of the only thriving ones inevitably makes potential users associate the platform with it and convinces them to either choose another Reddit alternative or simply avoid the inconvenience of switching platforms. While we may disagree with them, the failure of the Reddit blackout demonstrated that they make up the lion's share of users from large communities that have yet to materialize here. Better to have many communities with a diversity of opinions than only a handful of echo chambers.

who cares?

For me it's about all the subreddits that didn't migrate to Lemmy, and the ghost town feeling caused by only having 55,000 monthly users versus Reddit's 850 million. With Lemmy's active user count slowly dropping instead of rising, everything needs to be done to bring more redditors to Lemmy, whether they are supporters of piracy or not.

before there was reddit there were message boards and these message boards tended to be pretty small and niche. They would have low thousands of users, if that. I don't think having low user counts is something to be afraid of - especially for sites run and paid for by volunteers.

Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I'd like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren't promoted by a subreddit.

Yeah. Lemmy's entire population is about as large as some of the smaller gaming subreddits. Even /r/mildyinteresting has over 200k subscribers (4x as big as Lemmy), and that subreddit is a misspelling of /r/mildlyinteresting.

Nah I wouldn't want Lemmy to attract anti-piracy bootlickers (specially considering why we left Reddit for Lemmy in the first place). This being the largest community is a good filter imo.

Defederation really should be last resort, a lot of admin use it as a first one. (Even dbzer0 censors 187 instances)

The vast majority of those (on the dbzer0 list) are obviously just copied from someone's medium-sized mastodon blocklist, which in this case mostly includes instances that definitely deserve it. I recognize only a few dubious choices in there, and none that are completely indefensible.

The instances in our blocklist are based on the fediseer. It's mostly CSAM, Bigoted and potentiall spam instances.

The current fediseer censured list seems much larger and correspondingly more problematic in places. You've started out with a good list, hope you exercise due caution in adding to it.

The fediseer censure list is relative to which instances you're referencing. There's no absolute "fediseer censure list"

Yeah, sorry, I've never really looked at it before. But its web UI just shows them all as one big list. I wouldn't mind seeing a list of those censured by more than 10 instances, or all of a selected group of instances... is that in the API?

Yes you can do that in the API, as well as filter by tags. You can also select your instance references on the UI

But a federation is fragmentation. If the only thing that doesn't help reddit is another centralized system, then that's really just a claim that private ownership of the internet is good, actually, so long as we like the owners.

I assume they mean more like what's happening on Mastodon, where instances mass defederate other instances for not having the same instances defederated

Looks like Lemmy has a tragic flaw…not decentralized enough.

It's early days still. When this sort of thing triggers an "exodus" users will just shift to other instances, further decentralising the service without unduly hurting the platform. If big instances want to stay relevant they need to not enshittify. If it turns out that's impossible, then instances will have to stay small, which is fine by me. I certainly won't miss the majority of lemmy.world users.

Maybe the lemmy.world mods are just following The Golden Path, making the Fediverse more resilient through their tyranny!

When this happened the first time I just remade my account on another instance, resubscribed to all my communities from world and subscribed to my other ones that they blocked. Not ideal, I know, but I still (do far) have a single stop.

It's even easier with account migration now. I haven't tried it myself but apparently you can just sort of continue from where you left off.

I haven't either, if lemmy.ca turns to shit I'll try this next time.

Looks like the mods over at politics@lemmy.world banned me as I am not pro Trump. I am glad they revealed who they really are over there so I can block them too.

Much as I'd love to jump on the lemmy.world hate with your comment, I find they tend to be bog standard liberals with very little political education, not Trump supporters. Also your comment history is still visible in some apps, and it doesn't tell such a clear cut story as you're telling here.

If you are indeed anti-Trump, it's not clear from what you said there. In fact what you said was such a mess that I don't hold out a lot of hope for your response to this comment. I honestly don't blame them for giving you a time out.

It's because you're a moron lacking basic reasoning skills and calling everyone you see a sheep. People are having none of it bro

you were banned for trolling and not backing down when the downvotes for your posts, which resembled a schizophrenic outburst, started rolling in. don't lie man, the modlogs are public.

Sigh. At least the benefits of federation include being free to move into other instances while LW can pull stuff like this (probably because they get the heat from being the largest instance).

I made a account last time lemmy.wold blocked this community. Seems like il be sticking with this account for now

Glowies

WTF is a glowie?

It refers to how obvious undercover agents can be in online forums. So obvious that they glow

A paranoidal schizophrenic and a single dev of Temple OS thought thar he's watched and messed with by federal agencies. He knew, because he could see a glowing aura around them undercover agents. After his ramblings about it, 4chan boards users who watched his streams as a lolcow (a person of interest who can be milked for lulz) took this slang term from him. Then it spread everywhere.

Down the Rabbit Hole episode about him and his slow sad demise: https://youtu.be/UCgoxQCf5Jg?si=JlPs70O5gQCvau2z

So did I miss a setting where an instance can ban remote communities for its user base? I know a user can ban individual communities now but I didn’t realize it could be done at an instance level for all users of that instance.

Just like you can defederate from an instance, you can selectively defederate from parts of that instance.

Where is this instance hosted, anyway?

The IP resolves to vps-6dbc9b7d.vps.ovh.net. ovh.net is a French hosting company. The last hop before it that responds for me -- without about the same ping time, so probably in about the same location -- is be102.sbg-g2-nc5.fr.eu.

So it'll be France or thereabouts, at least presently. I suppose that it could be forwarding connections from there elsewhere.

Actually Ruud the owner of the instance is dutch. So I suppose it is hosted probably somewhere in the Netherlands? the IP is most likely a proxy.

Their legal page mentions the Netherlands, Finland, and Germany. I don't know which of the latter two they're hosted in but their hosting company is German, and Germany are a bunch of assholes when it comes to copyright.

I'm so glad I'm on my own instance.

I am running on Lemmy-Easy-Deploy but it seems to be abandoned. How do you have yours set up?

Well I guess that shows why I main kbin and not lemmy.world. Absolute dogshit decision from them.

Just deleted my account there and created this one earlier today. Hello!