Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:
We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.
This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Please make announcements on lemmy instead of exclusively on discord moving forward. That is the biggest issue here, the lack of public transparency. Such a decision affects all instances, not just lemmy.world and making it publicly known is important
This was a misunderstanding from one of the team members. It has since been discussed and will not happen again. Lemmy.World and this announcement community is our primary platform,
Reading all these comments it’s clear that a lot of people have unrealistic ideas regarding what Lemmy and the Fediverse are supposed to be (or maybe it’s me with weird ideas).
The Fediverse is just a bunch of apps that can all communicate with each other through a shared protocol. There is no requirement for them to be free speech platforms or host everything. The whole purpose of defederation supports the idea that instances are free to associate or disassociate with whichever instances they want. Furthermore, nearly every guide I read on joining Lemmy state that you should choose instances to join based on shared ideals/beliefs.
For everyone saying “I’m leaving lemmy.world” I say “Good. That’s what you’re supposed to do.” When the instance you join no longer aligns with what you want, you go to another instance and then you’ll be back to viewing all the communities you want to see. That is what the Fediverse is all about and how it’s designed.
These communities are not even hosted on lemmy.world, this is an absurdly overreacted response. There were no signs of any legal trouble and I can’t understand how lemmy.world specifically would be the target of such legal action. If you want to host an instance, you should do everything in your power to allow discussions on any topic, while in necessary cases disallowing direct posting/linking of illegal content. Instead, you chose to block a community that has long been known to avoid having any trouble with the moderators.
And on top of this, the removals were done following the request from a troll account, by a user involved in far more questionable discussions than the legal discussions currently going on in the now-removed communities. Should no attempt be made to differentiate between a legit legal concern and trolling?
Good ol’ Bungiefan_ak, creating troll accounts on any instance that’ll have them to troll all things piracy and post transphobic and hateful shit wherever they go.
Doesn’t matter if they are hosted here or not. The way federation works is that threads on different instances are cached locally.
We have NO issues with the people at db0 - we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more. As mentioned in the OP we would like to unblock as soon as we know we can not get in any legal trouble.
Well, caching content is not the same as copying it. The major difference in the court would be that caching is automatic - and as such you are not in complete responsibility of what it is you copied. If you do everything in your power to comply with any DMCA notices, then I couldn’t realistically see lemmy.world being targeted. This is an analogous situation to eg. accidentally opening a website containing illegal content. Sure, your computer did download the contents to the RAM, but what matters is that you acted in good faith and did not attempt to get the contents, it just happened in the process of browsing the web and as such you could not reasonably expect to receive such content.
Well, caching content is not the same as copying it.
A cache is literally a local copy.
Fighting legal challenges requires lawyers, even if you are in the right. Lawyers are crazy expensive.
Lovely this happened because someone complained after being banned from the piracy instance for being a transphobic asshole.
Not sure why people are downvoting you, since that’s exactly what happened. It’s Bungiefan_ak, a troll that admins are playing wackamole with, as the person keeps appearing on new instances and pulling the same shit.
Uh, @lwadmin@lemmy.world … what’s up with the banning going on in this thread? I noticed on a.lemmy.org that someone was labeled “banned” and their comment was simply “Ight, I’m out”
The mod note was “Let us help you”.
There are more similarly weak (spiteful?) bans that certainly don’t seem to be at a standard for a ban. “Litterally 1984” was another one. Is that all it takes to be banned here?
Edit: Many (all?) the users I referenced as banned are now unbanned from the site, but now banned from this community.
The “ight I’m out” ban note was… hm. Not a great look. Comes across as petty and vindictive.
There are worse, imo.
user @snake posted:
Did you ever consider ceding ownership of the instance to an entity with greater legal capabilities?
In the end, it will not make sense to try to keep this instance running if the owners are unable to provide adequate service to its users.
and was banned for:
reason: Go get your service somewhere else
Definitely not a great look.
Lemmy.world admins, I am truly asking you to please reflect on how bad this looks. It honestly makes you seem like you can’t handle criticism and if people get that vibe they will use it to absolutely fuck with you. I know from my own personal experience. I understand that you’re volunteers but this is a step in a very bad direction that will only serve to cause more issues.
Agree.
This decisions seems emotionally driven. That will not work on the internet.
You created rules. Use your rules to make your decisions. Don’t use your emotions.
It won’t only bring the site into disarray, it will bring you moderators and your emotional states into disarray.
Make your rules as black and white as poasible. where grayness raises, create new rules.
How fuckin childish.
Are you paying anything for this service? No. It has costs to maintain while they’re shouldering that on their own and giving you this service for free.
Get over yourself. The entire point of the fediverse is that anyone can host an instance. You can spin up a little free instance yourself and federate or defederate/block anything you see fit.
Why don’t you? I’m gonna guess because you want a low effort, free service to get your scrolling fix. In which case, they’re right. Go to a different instance that suits your values more. If you want an instance that won’t defederate or block others unless absolutely necessary, go join Lemm.ee. They federate with basically everyone and don’t block hardly anything.
And, Lemmy world is federated with them. So you won’t lose a single thing here if you move there.
Is it really childish to quote what someone else said and question it? Seems like quite an overreaction on your behalf to be honest.
Just wondering and looking at the mod log for one admin and maybe I am crazy but are they unbanning and rebaning users? (Keep in mind it goes new on top):
- admin Banned @snake from the community Lemmy.world Announcements reason: troll
- admin Unbanned @snake
- admin Banned @soviettaters from the community Lemmy.world Announcements reason: Troll
- admin Unbanned @soviettaters
- admin Unbanned @ilfi
- admin Removed Comment Spineless pieces of shit. by @sused reason: toxic
- admin Banned @sused reason: Bye
- admin Banned@ilfi reason: Inactive account comes back to troll. Bye
They’re unbanning them from a sitewide ban and then immediately banning them from the lemmyworld community.
Definitely think you should allow them again. Obviously not on your instance but restricting access to other instances is just not right. I do understand the concern though, I really hope in the end you realllow them.
Not even Reddit banned their r/piracy
Thanks for reminding us how much your instance sucks.
And still people are crying about this.
You can literally change to another instance. That’s the entire point of the Fediverse. If you don’t like a decision the admin has taken, you can move elsewhere.
The entitlement of some people these days is ridiculous.
The fuck are you talking about? Most sane people go “Damn, this thing I like is now doing a thing I don’t like. I’m going to let them know and hopefully enough people agree to change it back.” but people like you with full fedi brain go “Whelp, this instance has a mod whose name contains two letter U’s in it, better change instances.”
You’ve watered down what the word entitlement so much I’m starting to doubt you ever knew what it meant. Entitlement is demanding your preference be catered to for the sake of it, community is giving feedback on what makes sense and what doesn’t. A general, all-purpose instance shouldn’t ban content except in extreme cases like they themselves state, which is illegal content. Piracy is not illegal, it’s ambiguous. Communities about piracy are not illegal and are infinitely more legal than the act of piracy.
This action makes very little sense when looked at sensibly and rather than hopscotch around instances like your mom in an all-male sorority I think we should give feedback to make an instance better before discarding it carelessly like a used condom in that same all-male sorority.
Bro the fuck YOU talking about?
What would convince anyone to blindly accept liability for 100k users on a volunteer basis? If you owned the servers and your name was on the line, would you feel comfortable hosting “ambiguous” (your words) material?
Your tone echos the people that yell at FOSS devs on GitHub. You are the entitled one. It’s hilarious, you think you’re entitled to random people accepting liability on your behalf.
Friendly reminder 4chan has an entire board dedicated to posting magnet links to torrents as well as guides on how to use them in rare cases. On the clearnet. For everyone. If you don’t want to be a magnet link directory, fine, that’s an understandable position. Ban communities that allow magnet links. It is sheer paranoia to ban a community that merely engages in the discussion of piracy and related content and banning swaths of content on a general purpose instance defeats the entire point of ‘general purpose’.
But again, telling on yourself not knowing what the fuck entitled means. You’re seven layers of stupid treating piracy like it’s fucking CP.
Ratio.
Also lol at using 4chan as your example of how to run a site
Lemmy world clearly stated that they were not a “free speech” zone, that they would have rules, you joined anyway
This kid just said Ratio. Bro go back to your Twitter echo chamber, I’ve never given a shit if my opinions are popular, I care if they’re right.
By all means, be the most popular idiot you can be. None of what I’m advocating for is ‘free speech’ you lemming, it’s the contradiction of a ‘general purpose’ instance to ban content out of preference and masquerade it as legal liability. It’s not illegal (in the United States) so if it’s based there (which it likely is but I’m open to being wrong), it doesn’t break the rules even though they claim it is and does. So either they’re lying or are misinformed and according to Hanlon’s razor, one should never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently be explained by stupidity.
So to recap It’s not illegal. It shouldn’t be banned. I hope the admins change their mind. Take your ratio and hang it up on the fridge for your mom.
What part is illegal? Are they sharing files on that instance and your instance re-hosts it?
From my understanding, discussions are legal, guides are legal, tips are legal, but actual files (aka “copyrighted content”) is illegal. There are no files shared there, links at maximum, but institutions should be after those content-sharing websites, not forums.
I am against this decision and I am happy that I am not part of admins team.
Keep in mind, The Pirate Bay is “technically” not breaking any laws… how has that been going for them? You don’t have to break laws to get in trouble if you are pissing off rich people. They’ll find something, anything, to nail you on. It’s totally ok for random normal people to not want to be “heroes” to a bunch of other random people they don’t know. Heroes attract villains, and instability. And while it’s just starting to get off the ground, lemmy doesn’t need villains or instability.
Let the smaller, less visible servers do the shady but “totally technically legal” stuff. Big servers with big targets on their forehead need to be stable and drama-free.
The Pirate Bay is “technically” not breaking any laws
It does, it holds torrent files which usually “holds and shares” a copy right infringing content. While mentioning that website isn’t gonna bring any problems, linking the actual torrent file or link to that might bring problems.
It doesn’t hold any torrent files for over a decade now. It’s all magnet links which know nothing about the content.
