lemmy.world blocked the largest piracy community in all of lemmy

Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.
If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don't blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won't put them in the legal firing line.
- It's be nice if there'd been some discussion first, and perhaps a solution other than an admin vanishing a community without notice. Even just some text informing the user "You can't see this content on lemmy.world. Please go to the instance directly".
  Regardless if the decision is understandable, the method used here is not going to sit well with people. After how many years of spez, these kinds of behind the scenes snap decisions that change the site overnight with no apparent regard for the community is going to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. It wouldn't have hurt to bring it to the community rather than just shadow banning without a word.
  Not even because there needed to be a discussion, but just as a basic courtesy.
  It doesn't inspire confidence or endear the instance to its users.
- This is a well reasoned answer. If this were my instance I would also ban communities linking to pirated software. A single lawsuit and lawyer bill for a regular guy, and that can fuck your life up all because you tried to run a decent community. I have a username I use for browsing lemmynsfw, I'll make one for browsing piracy related things too.
  
  Best bet I think is to set up a non-profit limited liability type of company. Then at least there is a good chance the individual doesn't get fucked. (Ymmv depending on legal jurisdiction of course)
- Protecting himself from what? The community hosts literally zero pirated content.
- I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?
  
  No. .world is just afraid of everything. Better they shut down their instance.
  
  Not sa far as I know.
  
  No, but that hasn't stopped IP holders from bad faith litigations in the past.
- Why would Hollywood come after them? It is not like people are sharing movies there. Posts there are etremely mild.
  
  Sony Music is currently coming after DNS provider Quad9 for resolving a piracy related domain, and they've succeeded in two courts so far. At this point I don't think any copyright lawsuit is too stupid to happen.
  
  I'm not saying they are or aren't. I'm simply saying that we all know the big media companies go after people at the drop of a hat. They recently tried to get reddit to expose the identities of people discussing piracy over there. To their credit reddit told them no and defended themselves legally. And that's the issue. The media companies can accuse anyone of anything if it even slightly smells like piracy and the target has to legally defend themselves. This is fine if you're a multibillion valued company. Not so fine if you're just some guy who just wanted to run a Lemmy instance out of his own pocket.
- For me, it looks like people are mad at the US defaultism of the decision.
  I understand why. It makes for part of the users no sense as they are protected by the law. It looks like a US "shitshow". Countries are protecting the IP of the person, making it nearly impossible to pursue someone. Others have law allowing the use and the copy of copyrighted material for educational purposes. Some allow the download of copyrighted material.
  It's the same with GDPR. Meta must comply. There is no exception because US defaultism.
  And we can understand this point of view too. It's not binary as the US people think it is. It's more mixed depending of the country.
  Generally, outside of this drama, on the internet, people are reclaiming they right and don't want the US "example" anymore. They want the internet following their local laws like the GDPR for Europeans. They have the right to claim it. Thanks to GDPR, mandatory usb-c, battery replacement and others laws in Europe and outside, the consciences of are awakened that the US is not the model to follow in terms of law on the internet and technologies.
- lemmy.world is hosted in Finland hence they don't probably live in us

Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
- The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the "problem" is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.
  But obviously that's too much work and it's easier to just be a crybaby.
- This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.
- I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don't really have much choice in this matter considering there's no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they'd likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing

It's unfortunate, but it's kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I'll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.

Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn't care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn't even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Edit: Didn't mean to ridicule any of you all. I based my comment on my experience when I signed up. At that time there were plenty of instances to pick from and getting approved at my instance of choice was very quick. My bad.
- Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
  Maybe I didn't have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.
  Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it's the largest server, with the most users. 🙄
  
  I highly recommend opening a lurking account in one of the NSFW instances. They are probably some of the fastest, most progressive and best funded instances on Lemmy. You do not have to browse the NSFW content.
  
  It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc. Just head over to one ones that’s hosting the content, or check out others to see if they will keep federated with the pirate communities. Make the same username, and most won’t even know that you’re posting from a different instance. You can still see everything you did before, just also possibly some other stuff. You might also get beehaw and hexbear (for better or for worse is up to you)! I feel like I might hop instances a few more times before I settle.
  
  because by definition it's the largest server, with the most users. 🙄
  Which generally means it'll be the slowest and most overloaded. With federated systems, it's best to avoid large instances.
- Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
  Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn't stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
- It wasn’t the largest when some of us joined…
  
  There was 1000 people about when I signed up.
- What a snarky thing to say
- Is there an automated way to move my account and all content to another instance?
  
  I think the answer is not yet, but unless you're some kind of fediverse celebrity it shouldn't be that burdensome, right?
  
  You can use lasim.
  
  No but I believe there is something on GitHub to help subscribe to the same communities once you create a new account.
- Maybe you shouldn't even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
  To give credit where it's due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.
  Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.
  
  https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim is already a pretty easy option
- It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
  
  Honestly, I just found this place first, and I don't remember what I came here for. I didn't make an account, then I did recently and now get approved. Lets goo. Options are great the advantage of the Fediverse is that you can always create a new server instance every time. Probably always changing your IP every time the server gets taken down and have none of the names associated with it are the same.
- You are completely right, but account migration also needs to become available for situations like this.
- I made my account here while waiting for the instance I actually wanted to come online
- A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can't police beyond blocking the community / instance.
- I went with lemmy world so i could catch the widest net in content. And up till now i agreed with the reasoning of the other defederating.s But it seems like it won’t take much to provoke more restrictions. Guess i will have to lurk in other shores.
- This is basically what I did not that long ago.
- Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn't care about stuff like this.
  its not a bug, its a feature! the faceless admins get to tell you watch content you can get now, not a faceless corporations! its so good that all the instances are starting a war with each other over the content they host because it means we have the choice of who gets to decide what content we like to see!.
  
  I can sense the sarcasm of your post, yet the words you've written are actually true. This is exactly what decentralisation is all about. on some other websites you might lose access to the content entirely, on the fediverse you can just go there direct and still get all of the content, nobody can ever take that away from you except for the people who manage that content.
  That's literally the main selling point of this kind of setup. Nobody, faceless or otherwise, can stop you accessing any of the content.

This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
- Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
  
  Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
  
  Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)
- I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you're going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it's an unfair battle from the start.
  I can't blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There's a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it's protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.

I think people forget that decentralized doesn't mean anonymous, and it also doesn't mean that server admins and servers aren't beholden to local laws

- Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
  Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
  EDIT: The post in question in case others haven't seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
  
  Not even reddit admins were this stupid
  
  Lmao. What a shitshow
  
  And now the account that redirected all of lemmy.world has been banned from lemmy.world for ban evasion.
  This whole thing is weird
  
  https://lemm.ee/post/4235833 yours got a bad gateway
  
  They should have asked them to change their rules instead. Sharing DL links can get the admin in trouble. LueLinks had to do away with it at one point too, and they were primo pirate site back in the day. I think reddit had r/piracy and other subs change their rules - the one that had links to mushroom spore sellers (forgot the name) had to stop sharing links to sellers that sold magic mushroom spores (not an illegal thing to do). It’s tough, but admin made guiding rules, and that breaks one of them. Plus, if it’s on their server, it could be admins head on the chopping block.
- True but it hosted in Germany. That country does not take it easy on piracy...
  
  Even the German specific Lemmy instances like https://feddit.de do not block the piracy discussion communities.
  The piracy blocking stuff seems like something lemmy.world admins decided to do based on a troll from another instance demanding it.
- That user can sue if they don't obey, in most jurisdictions. If it comes that far, it's too late.
  
  Why would the user be able to sue? Unless they thought their work was being infringed (in which case why they wouldn't send a dmca?) I don't see what possible standing they'd have.

Wtf dbzero was a huge proponent of the fediverse and has been a part of the recent swell in users. I don’t agree with this decision at all
- Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
  
  At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating
  Would you mind explaining the difference?
- I mean if you support illegally hosted material you can be forced to take down your website. As much as it sucks, piracy is illegal. Anyways, they haven't defederated, just blocked that community.
  
  In many jurisdictions what they're doing there isn't illegal at all. It is well understood that you do not post links out in the open.
  Downloading isn't illegal, sharing is. At least outside of the US (and a few others)
- Only here because of my instance.

I'm late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin's decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people's idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It's totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say "thank you for hosting us" and move on if it's not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.

Given lemmy.world's uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I'd be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao

I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was "oh no what now" but with lemmy it's just "time to move to another instance"
- I just don't like the idea of having 500 accounts after it's all said and done, especially if most of them wind up being unused... unless I'm fundamentally doing something wrong by creating a new account on every instance I want to use?
  
  I mean you won't, they way it's going to shake out is instances with similar values form nation-states and cut ties with other nation-states they dont agree with
  well probably see the emergence of meta-alliances soon that dictate the degree of separation of a blacklisted instance.
  
  You don't need an account for every instance.
  How it will mostly evolve in the future is that people will have one vanilla account, and if they want, one account for piracy and another for porn
  
  I just spun up my own instance and federate with whoever I want.
  
  I mean saying 500 is a little hyperbolic but this is exactly why federation exists and isn’t just another Reddit.
  You find what you like and go there. It’s really no different than the old forums. Reddit centralized everything, lemmy is that but also the old way.
- I feel a little better about it if lemmy provided migration tools.
  It certainly not the end of the world but it is kind of a pain in the ass.
- Reddit has plenty of piracy communities, being more strict than reddit is is just unnecessary
  
  They also had quite a few subs that got shut down due to copyright threats. Reddit can afford to fight multimillion dollar suits.
  
  We should just move posting to reddit and have the lemmy instance in question only be links to reddit posts.
- I love it. We will win in the end, against the corpos, they shall rule in Hell whilst we serve in Heaven
  
  Normal people not wanted to put themselves in legal jeopardy doesn't make them a "corpo".
  
  Uhhh I think you misunderstand the original quote

This is not difficult to deal with, setup an account on another server and stop using lemmy.world
- Huh, isn't this Spez strategy?
- No need to stop using LW. I’ve got three accounts on different instances plus kbin. Oh, and I fifth on if you count my nsfw login. Partitioning your online life is nbd, really. And the fediverse makes it easy.
  
  Why bother to have 5, an account on a single decent instance should be sufficient.

Despite reports I have decided to keep the comments open and the post up. I think removing this will only add fuel to the fire.
- I can't really comment atm. It's not my job to do pr for the admins but I am just a mod and I am not on the admin team. I wasn't involved in the decision. I am trying my best to be transparent though because I don't want this to evolve in a bigger issue.
- Thank you for your work!

And here I thought that Fediverse was serious about being an alternative to heavily censored platforms. Now I see it's just a joke.

Beauty of fediverse, people can just find another spot or move to another instance while most of the community continues no problem.
Just an example that system working as intended
- but only if you know enough about the fediverse to be aware; if i had no logged into like i usually don't do on these days, i would never know and spend the rest of my time on lemmy.world trying to figure out why i can't find any pirating stuff to share.
  
  I would think it would be the responsibility of lemmy.world to put up a notice of why they've done this, if they've not then that potentially reflects badly on them (but I don't know enough about the details and reasons).
  
  True but nothing a little education can't fix.
  Rome wasn't built in a day.
- Is there an automated way to move my account and all content to another instance?
  
  Check this program: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
  
  NO idea tbh but looks like someone already thought about it lol

- People are missing the fundamental point of defederation. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
  You can have an absolutely squeaky clean instance for memes, news and generally huge sharing communities. Instances that dont have to worry about DCMA notices or having their servers seized and you can have instances that are willing to run those risks for niche content. If legal threats start being thrown around, the meme and hobby communities dont suffer. The piracy instances can shut down, migrate and start again, making the lawyers play whackamole.
  
  ikr...feels like I'm taking crazy pills here. this is federation at work.
- coerce police into taking into custody entire servers
  Name instances where this has happened, other than on entire websites dedicated to piracy. And overzealous hosting providers who shut down entire servers over a single DMCA (especially when the site doesn't appear to host any content) should be avoided.
  But I agree that it's his own instance and he should do what he wants with it; that'd be the beauty of federation.

What's the fucking point. The community isn't even hosted on lemmy.world. I don't want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.

Why are so many people still on Lemmy world. We're supposed to be decentralized. One of the benefits to decentralization is that you can choose to avoid blocks like this. Stop centralizing!

This is fucking lame and will have a HUGE impact on Lemmy as a whole.
Sorry to be blunt, but this is an ignorant and dumb move. Nobody likes over-moderation.
👎
- Unless the users themselves are directly posting links to the content and hosting it (the pirated content) on lemmy, no instance would be held liable. Anyone defending this has no idea what the fuck they are talking about.
- No, it won't. Only those little bits.
  Because that's how the fediverse works.
  You should like... not be so quick to call people ignorant. Especially when you're displaying a lot of ignorance as to how this entire setup works.

piracy is the only remaining counter force to the full blown mega corp monopolies that have full price control and right now showing us that with their way above inflation extraction antics.
It’s sad it has come to this but given failure to regulate and the concentration and capture of almost everything by these companies rent seeking everyone really requires some kind of counterbalance.
I’m guessing LW is also prepping for a shareholder sellout down the road.

I don't know why people feel indignated by this, they're just trying to save thier ass and prevent future problems with the law. Chill out

Who would win?
One troll account made 10 hours ago.
the entire lemmy.world userbase.
Admins decide.
- the reddit admins ruined reddit, lets move to lemmy so the lemmy admins can ruin lemmy.

Turns out finding a good lemmy instance is a huge pain in the ass. I started on lemmy.ml but it was full of tankies so I moved to lemmy.world now they banned piracy so I'm on lemm.ee which gets a lot of crap from tankies still, not as bad as lemmy.ml but it's really fucking annoying. Like I'm not interested in Russian propaganda or how the soviet union's genocide was justified actually, please give the user a way to block all tankies and nazies and stop blocking things globally for everyone.

lemmy.world admins need a lesson on the Streisand Effect.

The nice thing about federation is that we can all go fuck ourselves and die alone on our personal private servers under a bridge.

All for a request of a racist troll/disney bootlicker

Eh, so what? Migrate to another instance.

Wow! Even Reddit hasn't shut down the Piracy subreddit.

Well, this is goodby to lemmy.world! Rest in pieces

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
Always relevant, and will be for any large Lemmy server.

Begun, the Lemmy Wars have.

Guess I gotta instance hop. I need me mateys
- I've gotta hop as well; I'm trying to find the biggest/most mainstream instance that hasn't blocked or defederated from the piracy communities. Will have to check this list and find one when I get a chance.

Well at least lemmy.world is starting to look more and more like shit. Can't keep the servers up, keep defeding, absolute nonsense.
- The instance wasn't defederated. Just the community blocked.
  
  Which doesn't makes it less shitty.
- they are volunteers paying from their own wallets to keep this going. You aren't entitled to anything on the fediverse. grow up.
  
  And the end product isn't very good, regardless of effort.
- I don't think you understand what "defeding" means.
- Reddit 2.0
  Edit: I saw I got lot of downvotes and I realize my mistake: This is not Reddit 2.0 because not even reddit was stupid enough to block their r/piracy.
  
  Feels like home doesn't it!?
  ಠᴗಠ

One would think the devs would dedicate some time to fix this particular failing of Lemmy, because "download the entire internet of a site because one (1) user posts in one (1) community in one (1) server" is just ridiculous from a lot of standpoints, both technical and legal.

I just created an account on lemm.ee - thanks for the info.

Who is actually "infuriated" by this? Some idiots?

I love all the salty comments about having to move. Its piracy, it will always be removed if it becomes too popular. This is how it has always been and always will be. No one is obligated to feed you free shit without any effort on your part. They take one place down and you move on. Either get used to it or start paying for services.

What a disappointment.

Time to make an alt account asap

Well glad I had already started changing instances.

This is basically why lemmy is a hassle. One shit gets blocked, you move and register then you learn these guys are alt-right or peddle child porn or some other bullshit and then you have to register again and again. It's confusing and quite annoying.

- Why? That's the whole principle of decentralization, not having to support one host in particular...

Rule 1 is too vague.
No illegal content, including sharing copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the owner(s).
They can defederate with any instance with this rule. Why not just say "because we want to"?
- Unless those communities were sharing links to pirated content. If it was just talk about piracy and piracy news then I don't think that's a good reason to defederate.
  
  No illegal content
  Illegal in which country? Copyright infringement isn't illegal in my country for example, except for severe cases where you're profiting off of it. If we have to cater to all countries' laws we might as well ban music as well since it's illegal in Afghanistan.
  
  There are many different laws with different countries. Don't forget that most (if not all) Fediverse instances are run by people in their free time with donations that just cover server costs. They aren't LLCs so there is always the concern about legal issues. Not sure if that is their motivation but could be part of it.

That's disappointing. Guess I'll join another instance.

Better to insulate the major instances from potential liability. If people want to find the piracy channels, they can.

I don’t care about the piracy community but people are complaining about they having to create multiple accounts and saying Lemmy will never reach critical mass like this…
But why would we want to reach critical mass? I don’t want to sound like a gatekeeper but growing just for the sake of growing is never been good on anything.
Specially as Lemmy is still an alpha software. And people are still figuring out how is the better way to moderate ourselves instead of waiting to Big Corpo to do so.
This is part of being an early adopter. You give feedback, sometimes things don’t go your way, other they hear you out.
I’m loving the experience so far. The Fediverse still is not mature enough (we block fast) but we are still figuring things out.

Oh no, anyway. The community itself is still available for the adventurous.

Kind of a shitty move really

To try and counter some of the stupidity in this comment section: There is nothing illegal about the piracy community and not even Reddit blocked it, the dbzer0 server has been one of the most civil and well managed around and this is a rediculess move!

Who cares. Lemmy.world sucks. I got tired of the constant server issues and switched a while ago. It took me like 5 minutes to find another instance and create an account. If my new instance does dumb shit like this, I'll just move again. Isn't this the whole point of Lemmy?

Glad I host my own instance so I get to choose what I get to see.

Well, they can just open it on another instance. This is the beauty of Lemmy and the Fediverse.
- No need. Users can go to other instances and continue accessing it from there just fine.
- Yeah, but we are not expected to deal with this kind of shit too soon and out of nowhere.