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Removal of piracy communities (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] WereCat@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

I do understand that you would remove them if they were also hosted here... But they are hosted on other instances so I don't understand the issue? Is linking to that specific instance via comment the same issue as if they were visible for everyone on this instance? Or even mentioning it now in the OP like it is?

[-] bustrpoindextr@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

It downloads to their instance, that's how the federation works. So it's effectively also hosted here.

[-] WereCat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

If that's the case then OK, thanks for explanation.

[-] bustrpoindextr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

No problem, and it makes sense from a technical perspective if you care.

Lemmy instances are not operated by a single entity, which means their uptimes are going to differ, possibly dramatically. If the federation simply linked to the other instances, then if say Lemmy world went down, all the instances that federate with it would have a lot of broken content.

Instead, what happens is that the content is still interact able on the other instances, because there exists a copy. When Lemmy world comes back online, content gets synced and merged from the instances that were still available.

It allows for a natural redundancy, so what you can do, is create another instance all your own, curate only the things you care about, and have that data populated on your instance. Then the next time we're in an upgrade cycle you can still view previous content from Lemmy world and others instead of constantly just getting a 503 error.