It’s gone. Wanted to ask over here before I went to check on Reddit.
Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.
Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.
De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.
Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.
Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.
Defederation is bad.
It’s not really apt to compare email to Lemmy. Email is a one-to-one communication method, it’s like sending a letter in the mail. In the same way a mail carrier isn’t culpable if they deliver a package of drugs, Google isn’t responsible for delivering illegal emails. On Lemmy though, you’re hosting a copy of the post locally on your instance. It’s accessible to users as well as people who aren’t signed in.
More like Usenet than email.
Hmm, that’s a good point, it might make a legal difference in some places. I think it should be treated like email.
lemmy.world blocked it. I guess it is their right to do so, if you want to keep access to it move to another instance (it is not healthy that so many people are on LW).
Its not gone. Its just blocked by lemmy.world…
Its hosted on dbzer0
Official statement
Can someone transcribe this for those of us using screen readers? As a server in Canada, We’re also worried about the hosting risk of the piracy community and considering blocking it. I’d love to read the LW statement.
They made a announcement here on Lemmy https://lemmy.world/post/3234363
The original was posted on discord. It was:
Removal of Piracy Communities
Earlier today, 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: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !piracy@lemmy.ml, !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
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 assitance in obtaining it.
Thanks! Perfect. Wish I could award…Lemmy Gold? LOL
Lemmy Lemon 🍋
Here’s the original announcement in text: https://lemmy.world/post/3234363
Thanks for the reminder that screenshots aren’t accessible for everyone.
Thanks! I didn’t realize there was an announcement on Lemmy, or I would have searched. Unfortunately screenshots are kind of the only way to share posts on Discord, because you can’t link someone to a Discord message on a server they’re not a member of, so I can’t blame you for a screenshot there. However, it is possible to add alt-text on images you post to Lemmy. :-)
Is allowing access to piracy resources the same as hosting piracy resources? Is Comcast at risk of being shut down because they didn’t block everyone’s access to RARBG? This is largely rhetorical; the answer is “no”. lemmy.world’s admins are not being honest.
Through federation, lemmy.world would host the content because it pulls all content from all federated instances.
There is no content in these communities, they are for discussion. Linking to content is against the rules in fact.
Are you sure that’s true? All content from all other federated servers are hosted on all other servers? That certainly doesn’t sound right; I thought that the fediverse protocol just allowed us access to other servers running the protocol, not that our instance actually runs content from their instance.
Yes, this is how federation works and it’s the main point all those users that are bitching about the move do not understand. LW does not care about piracy, they are afraid of legal consequences, because with the federation protocol you are hosting all content of other instances. It’s not embedded, it’s mirrored, so there is no legal difference between the origin instance and the federated instance.
Lemmy.world’s admins are well within their rights to exclude evil people who take what doesn’t belong to them from being a part of the lemmy.world instance.
Facilitating Piracy no matter how you put it is wrong and illegal, it is wrong and illegal to support people who do it.
Welp, hopefully more people simply move instances.
Glad to see Lemmy.world doing their part to keep the Fediverse safe and legal for all users here.
The contents are still hosted by respective instances.
World achieves nothing, they dont even host the contents. This is pure power trip or irrational fear, or both.
lemmy.world deleted their copy of it (due to site rules, and prompted by a concerned Internet citizen)
It’s probably the biggest Community in all of Lemmy, so the ramifications will be interesting.
lemmy.world has been acting very weird lately. Almost like they are the one and the only authority of Lemmy.
It’s their instance, they are free to do as they wish to comply with their local regulations
I’d mind less if their own instance wasn’t so broken.
I moved to lemm.ee from lemmy.world after that whole hack thing a few weeks ago and it seems like lemmy.world has been going through some weird shit ever sense.
We knew it was you!
Ye I think I need to start my own instance, That’s the only way I can get away from bullshit like this
Quick and easy, self hosting for a while now.
I’ve been on my own instance since I started using Lemmy a few months ago and it’s amazing to just… do whatever I want.
You know, I agree that this is definitely the beauty of Lemmy’s federated nature but I’m somewhat perplexed by statements like “I can do whatever I want”. I mean for sure, in theory you definitely can, but were really being held back before? I just personally have never actually run up against the limits of my freedoms online and being unable to do something I want to do. I’m probably just super vanilla and boring I suppose. I guess the recent shit with Reddit is an example where I really was constricted, by virtue of no longer having the choice of mobile app to access the website through, but then, I just jumped ship to Lemmy. I can imagine I might run in to a situation where the admins of the instance I signed up to block a community I liked, but it’s very rare that this is a community that I care about and when it is, there’s almost always another server around I can make an account for and sign up to all the same communities as before. I guess in typing this I’m seeing that the answer is that, with your own instance you won’t have to keep hopping, but I guess I just so rarely get inconvenienced by admin decisions that it’s never seemed worth the trouble.
If it’s not too prying, can I ask what is it you want to, and in practice really would do, that running your own instance has now allowed you? Not just theoretical but, like a real existing capability that you’ve gained and make use of regularly? It’s appealing to me from a theoretical basis and sometimes the theory and principle alone is enough, but the effort barrier hasn’t seemed worth it for the theoretical gains alone.
Hexbear drove them mad.
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Exactly. I don’t get why people are freaking out so much when it’s easy to create a new account and clients support multiple accounts anyways. Big instances are a big target so they need to protect themselves. On Reddit the piracy subs are neutered because they can’t link to anything. What’s good about the fediverse is you can have sub verses within it. It’s dumb to have your piracy account linked to your main account anyways.
Having multiple accounts is an inconvenience that shouldn’t be required
I don’t really get it though, it’s not like they’re trying to court advertisers.
Or are they?
They’re trying to avoid law enforcement and lawyers at their doors.
Even if you prevail, either can be a very expensive and/or destructive process.
Make no mistake, Reddit’s recent refusal to provide details surrounding users that were discussing piracy is highly unlikely to happen in the fediverse. Admins are going to get hit with a subpoena and comply because they can’t afford not to.
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Huh? The Piracy community on dbzer0 is still up, just checked.
People on LW can’t see it anymore apparently
Another reason to create an account on a smaller instance rather than .world
And this one is going to actually have an impact
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Let’s see what happens when we get everyone to defederate your ass for supporting illegal content, or are you going to evade their defederation attempts with a new domain? Are you going to violate their right to censor and ban you on their server with their own rules.
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Instances aren’t banning other instances for federation with communities they dislike. Instances ban other instances for hosting content they dislike. The benefit of starting an instance is you choose who to federate with.
If anyone’s looking for a new instance, feel free to join mine! https://lemmings.world
Based chadmins of lemmy.world blocking biggest piracy community
How is that based?
It is more akin to what other social media sites are doing…
Pirating stuff you can pay for is the opposite of based lol
Nobody likes a thief
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Piracy is theft, you are taking something you are not entitled to without paying or asking, that is wrong and illegal, you do not get to do that.
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The first time I pirated a game was when I was unable to play Mass Effect 2 due to DRM blocking my ability to play at all (highlighting the irony of DRM, the fact that the pirated version was free of this issue).
When I had a potato PC, I would often pirate games before I bought them, to see if they would be able to run. If I hadn’t done that, I would have erred on the side of caution and not bought any games I was unsure of.
There are also a few pieces of media I’ve enjoyed that would have been literally impossible to access if I hadn’t pirated them, and were impossible to pay for.
Piracy can also allow people to access games and/or software that would otherwise be lost to time (abandonware).
Not all piracy is stealing and also some stealing is based.
They are very based, I’m happy we have nice people like them.
Lmao these idiots are on a power trip already. Running the biggest instance in the ground is a great way to start it all off. Fucking idiots.
Way to misunderstand federation + legal issues… Go cry foul on reddit, they share your “outrage” mindset
Just make an account on another server that is federated with them.
I don’t think they are idiots more centralization means more regulation weather one likes it or not, regulators somewhere will notice you more popular you become. Piracy is illegal and media publishers will use law whenever they can to target whatever they notice. It’s now LW’s fault. Problem is it grew too big too fast. All these FOSS apps they were showing LW as default option to sign up instead of randomised one. So a big mass gathered at LW and bada-boom-bada-bam piracy banned. Register on smaller instances or run your own.
That would be true if piracy was hosted on their instance, which isn’t the case. They just defederated the main hub because they’re a bunch of white knight cry babies. Also piracy isn’t illegal in the majority of the world. I don’t live in the US and don’t give a shit about the bottom line of some giant media corporation that would destroy literal lives in the pursuit of greed. Just the fact that so many people jump to the defense of these corporations is very telling about the current state of the fediverse.
LW blocked three communities on db0, but they didn’t defederate with db0. This means LW users can still talk to db0 users, and db0 users can still access LW. At the same time, content from db0 will not be mirrored on LW servers. Basically, they’ve covered their arses from legal issues, while not cutting ties entirely.
As I understand, LW servers are hosted by a German company, and Germany is rather strict on piracy. So I understand why they had to do this.
Yeah there is nuance to everything. I totally understand LW’s decision and I don’t blame them, main reason I don’t have an account in LW becauze I saw this day coming long ago. And if lemmy keeps getting popular even lemmus.org might do the same and I would understand that too
LMAO you think an Instance enfocing their rules is a power trip? You sound like the dumbasses I banned from r/PS2 and r/3dshacks who would ask how to pirate games against our rules and then whine and complain that we were power tripping because we banned them using our own authority as mods in our own subreddit.
Of course you’re a reddit mod…
Removed by mod
They removed it because it facilitates the sharing of illegal pirated content.
