This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
Spin up a piracy instance on a server in China or Russia and be done with it.
A good way to get roskompozor on your back thought 👀.
Roskompozor?
They are busy blocking localhost
A Russian word play around Roskomnadzor, i.e. The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, an agency responsible, among other things, for censoring media and blocking access to Internet resources, as well as proceeding with criminal allegations on illegal content.
Pozor (Позор) means “shame”.
This isn’t reddit. There’s a clear solution here: decentralization. Aka, like the entire point why we’re on Lemmy in the first place. Join another instance lol.
I’m surprised the major Lemmy servers even permit piracy related content in the first place. Half the Fediverse seems to be hosted in Germany, probably one of the worst countries to host piracy related content.
The .world team should definitely make a statement before banning stuff just to avoid this kind of drama, but piracy communities are not worth the moderation hassle and legal risk for a silly side project like Lemmy.
If I were you, I wouldn’t expect the same privacy protections Reddit provides for their users when copyright owners start sending legal threats. These instances barely collect enough donations to cover server costs, nobody is going to pay an expensive lawyer to protect your IP address if your server gets sued.
Yeah, we should run this shit through Somalia, they don’t give a f u c k.
I mean, it’s not on their server. It’s hosted on dbzer0.
But of they federated they’ll be hosting a copy.
Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It’s 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that’s not exactly great for a piracy community either.
Image loading example
I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could’ve been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.
Ayo what the fuck how’d you do that
Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.
Yeah people are really weird about this. They want a free distributed forum hosted by small admins, but don’t want those individuals to take basic legal precautions? Piracy might be moral, but it’s a liability which will absolutely impact the viability of servers in many places. Grow up.
When “reddit outside of reddit” does reddit things 🫨
The benefit is that it isn’t just another reddit but rather network of reddits
Banned on one? Get from another.
I’m referring specifically to lemmy.world, not to all of lemmy or even the fediverse.
Alright what instance do i jump ship to?
Your own.
Come to Lemmy.dbzer0.com that’s where I jumped to last time .world got banney.
This is basically the very instance most piracy communities are hosted on, so you get extra benefit of ALWAYS having access to it regardless of defederations.
Did they really do it again, fucking hell. I came here for a better experience then Reddit and I feel like it’s starting to be a worse experience then Reddit. Transparency from admin my ass.
Feel free to join any other instance from that list: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances?tab=readme-ov-file
You can export and import your settings (including subscriptions and block lists) in two clicks from your account settings.
Yeah looks like I’ll have to.
Well this comment section was an interesting read. Interesting how many comments still bend the discussion towards bashing lemmy.ml and defederating from it. People, it’s not even the topic of this post?
Also it seems like very few actually read the post beyond the title? The problem is not lemmy.world banning the piracy community, they have the right to do so, that’s how federation works. The problem is them making a promise to make announcements about such bans in advance, but they instead did it quietly in the background again.
PSA: Lemmy.ml has a piracy community and federates with everyone world federates with so you can have the same experience.
Is lemmy.world trying to appeal to advertisers? Kinda sounds like it. Banning discussion oriented piracy subs, outlawing paywall bypassing in news@lemmy.world, etc.
Do they even have advertisers? Tbh I’ve had adblockers on for years I wouldn’t even know.
Lemmy is probably the worst place to sell to advertisers seen how many people run adblockers around here
That’s why I moved!
What a bunch of fucking clowns.
Anyways… !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
That returns an error.
Is there another instance you’d recommend?
Try this link: lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Heartbreaking - AI Is Starting To Take The Jobs Of People Who Make Unhelpful Corrections On The Internet
Lemmy world:
- Runs the largest Lemmy instance, for free, for your enjoyment.
- Accepts all liability for content
- Posts a transparent TOS
- Lists which countries’ governing laws apply to it
- Gave a valid reason for the removal of those communities in the modlog
Users, not even on Lemmy World:
I’m not in the loop, but I would imagine there was a letter or email to them or their service provider that prompted that.
Remember: Pretty much every Lemmy instance is run by volunteers that don’t have legal departments.
Yeah like.
This isn’t reddit dot com opaquely purging your favourite subreddit for some unspecific corporate reason.
The admins stated quite clearly why they are blocking it (“we don’t want trouble, and our TOS lay out that we’ll defed from illegal shit for our own safety”), and it is their instance. And unlike Reddit – The community is still THERE in its home server. It has not been burninated. – You can just. Make an account elsewhere. It’s free. It takes less than 5 minutes. You can even KEEP your LW account for other communities.
I would imagine there was a letter or email to them or their service provider that prompted that and likely named those communities specifically
What I’m curious about is, why haven’t lemmy.dbzer0.com received those takedown messages? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the source instead of just another instance hosting the content but not actually “responsible” for the content, so to speak? Or maybe they have?
Also curious why lemmy.world has still not made a statement about this or even acknowledged it (at least I haven’t seen any acknowledgement so far). Removing the communities from their instance is of course totally within their power and right, but this isn’t exactly the most transparent way to do it.
regarding your first question - they usually go after the big fish first. dbzer0 might still be flying under the radar, and also might be ina different jurisdiction where the specific plaintiff can’t go after them, or where it’s harder for them to do so
What I’m curious about is, why haven’t lemmy.dbzer0.com received those takedown messages? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the source instead of just another instance hosting the content but not actually “responsible” for the content, so to speak? Or maybe they have?
So many unknowns. Until LW makes an announcement, it’s all speculation. I haven’t seen any mention from db0 about takedowns, etc, but those may just be background noise for him. lol
Db0 seems confused based on their comments about this situation over on the piracy community. Said there was zero notice or communication from LW ahead of time
I don’t know the inner politics of it, but I did check lemmy.world/instances and db0 wasn’t on the “blocked” list. AFAIK, based on their modlog, just those two communities were blocked (unless that’s changed since i last looked)
Yeah something’s going on. As of 10 hours ago Db0 has no idea what exactly that is though, which is odd because I believe typically LW would reach out to him about the offending content if it was a DMCA type thing. Idk
Are you telling me Reddit is free to have a Piracy sub, but Lemmy isn’t?
What’s the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?
Reddit is a company that has a legal department (e.g. has lawyers on retainer). Lemmy World is run by volunteers and donations.
What’s the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?
That’s such a broad question that I’m not even going to bother. Instead, I’ll answer with the same question as when “states’ rights” are brought up:
“
States’ rightsFree to do what, exactly?”You seem to be confusing Lemmy.world with Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy is free to be used for anything by anyone.
Lemmy.world is the largest and most mainstream Lemmy server, so they need to be especially careful about legal issues. If lemmy.world gets taken down due to mirroring content hosted on lemmy.dbzer0.com, the whole network would partially collapse because of how many users and communities are hosted on lemmy.world.
It’s not even close to worth the risk. This is how federation is supposed to work.
Isnt the federations key idea to avoid collapse if any single instance it failing? This sounds like the system has become too centralized around lemmy.world
It’s definitely not ideal to be this centralized around lemmy.world. But it’s also nearly impossible to prevent some amount of centralization, especially at our current size. With only 50k active users, we don’t have enough people to sustain activity if things were more spread out.
It’s still so early. If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized. A year ago, about 70-80% of the whole network was basically centralized on lemmy.ml. I dont have the exact numbers because I wasn’t here yet, but looking back at the stats there were only a few thousand active users at that time and the vast majority were on lemmy.ml
Now, only about 40% of the network is on lemmy.world (20k/50k users). I just think there are natural incentives that will continue to push us in the direction of decentralization, but we haven’t quite reached the tipping point where that starts to happen.
It definitely has. Hopefully this decision will nudge people into other instances.
the dbzer0 piracy community has been around much longer than most of the users here. they spun up when they saw the writing on the wall, and they permit things that would not be permitted on reddit. and, it seems, they permit things that are not permitted on .world.
but the instance is still there. the community is still there.
and you can leave .world, join an instance that hasn’t banned !piracy, and keep right on going.
Evidence No. 3783 that “social media” and “privacy” do not mix well together.
Let me repeat one more time:
- anything you write online should be considered public.
- There is no “consent-based” fediverse.
- There is no “GDPR protects me from that”.
- There is no “security through obscurity”.
- There is no “dark corner of the internet”.
No matter your morals and ethical values, If you need to have any type of conversation that you think might get you in legal trouble, do not have this conversation in a public forum. Use #matrix if you have to, and even then you’d still need to worry large group chats which may have some undercover agent.
And if you really concerned about “censorship”, then ActivityPub is not for you. Go join forces with the bitcoiners and use #nostr.
And anything you write or upload to Lemmy should be considered permanent, as it immediately spreads throughout all the instances and they actually don’t have to respect edits or removals. And if instances defederate from each other then they simply can’t, as they don’t sync those requests any more - if Lemmy.World decided to defederate from Sopuli, this message would become permanent and I could not do anything about it.
Oh oops, you haven’t pasted some cool copyleft licence below your words on this niche thread on a niche social media network so looks like I might remix and reuse your content without attribution… Unlucky
ZUCKERBERG HAS NO LEGAHL AUTHROITEE YO MY UPLOADS I RETAIN ALL OWNERSHIP FOR EVERYTHING.
Is it bad that I hope Nostr takes off?
Not at all. I myself have been playing with the possibility of adding support to it on Fediverser, to have a place for the mirror bots.
The thing that gets me is the quote in the OP from last time this happened. It has been +12 hours of silence when you said last time you’d have this discussion BEFORE. Maybe it’s for legal reasons but you’d think they’d have said well, something.
“The cloud is just other people’s computers” - It’s inconvenient, but those computers are real, physical objects subject to oversight from real, physical law enforcement.
“but it’s not my computer, so you should be willing to host any of it”
The point was transparency, don’t try to distract from the issue.
This is precisely it.
One other point is, some instance want to focus on certain things, and take the risks, where others don’t.
Our community feddit.uk doesn’t do nsfw, because it’s not worth the headache for what our main focus is.
The guy running lemmynsfw on the other hand, is enthusiastically embracing the challenges involved, and more power to him!And in the end, it works. We handle Mr. Brains Pork Balls, they can handle…other balls.
Our community feddit.uk doesn’t do nsfw, because it’s not worth the headache for what our main focus is.
Same for my instance and for the same reasons. We have nothing against that, just, like you said, not our focus nor worth the headache.
And in the end, it works. We handle Mr. Brains Pork Balls, they can handle…other balls.
🤣
People speaking out and getting mad is natural and helpful. It’s how discourse works at this scale. Maybe the mods change their actions or maybe they don’t, but saying nothing about bad things happening won’t help anyone and getting mad that others are saying things is stupid.
They should defederate from Lemmy.ml for having admins complicit in violating Strafgesetzbuch section 86a instead of this crap.
Stop crying about it and just join a new instance, pretty simple.