Removal of piracy communities
Removal of piracy communities
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.
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This is problematic. I have no issue with the instance defederating from toxic communities such as hexbear. And i understand that in the fediverse, admins are free to block what they want, just like i am free to join another instance. The problem here is blocking the communities because of a perceived risk of legal trouble for the instance owners. I don’t blame the instance owner/admins for not wanting to take the risk, but if the risk is real, every instance (unless based in a country that does not care about copyright laws) would have to block not only piracy related material, but also anything that may be copyright infringement or otherwise legally questionable. That would lead to a very fragmented fediverse, where you need separate accounts on different instances. That may be a minor inconvenience at most for techies, but a serious roadblock for the general public.
I feel like people really didn't understand the fediverse when they migrated over.
Yes, it absolutely is a concern for all instances. Setting up an instance is trivial, running it safely and with any longevity is not. Back in the day you could set up a bulletin board (vbb, phpbb, etc) and you'd have a tiny user base that likely didn't make anyone's radar. But if users started sharing copyrighted material, sharing direct links to copyrighted material, etc, you'd risk the ire of regulators.
With the fediverse, you're way more fucked. You accept everyone until you don't. You can host child porn on your instance and you won't know it. You could be hosting malware disguised as an image. You could have communities operating with coded messages facilitating terrorism or the sex trade, and unless you're monitoring every apub message, you don't know.
It absolutely is correct for every instance administrator, especially the most visible ones, to take a proactive stance against content that may lead to legal troubles. In fact I would avoid open federation and instead use a whitelist as an instance manager unless you specifically want to invite the headache that is wide open federation.