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.
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.
dude is such a piece of shit
They only do it because it works. Had they been given the level of attention—and interaction—that trolls deserve, they would quickly move on to doing other things with their life. But as long as one single well-placed comment can result in so many people getting annoyed from so many different perspectives, it’s easy to see the appeal that these trolls see…
What is it about Destiny that attracts pieces of shit?
If you post to a community that isn’t local, the content of the post is stored on your local server and the remote server just makes a copy. The posters home server is where the illegal content is hosted.
Yes, so illegal content will end up being stored on both servers. The thing is that the piracy communities don’t allow illegal content to be stored or linked to for the same liability reasons.
Which has me wondering why these moves make sense at all. So many people are jumping to the defense of a knee-jerk reaction to a 10h old troll account. Why was that the admins’ solution to a random post from a new account? Plus, pirate communities shared vast amounts of information and a lot of it is not directly related to piracy itself.
It’s an elephant in the room. It’s an unavoidable topic that will eventually need to be addressed at some point.
Its literally not. Piracy topics are all over the web.
Others have already pointed it out, but Reddit had to fight a subpoena to reveal users who discussed piracy on their site in 2011 and 2018. And just because everyone else is doing it is not a good argument to justify why this instance should expose themselves to an unnecessary risk.
Any specific infringement material (by which I mean media) would only be on the user’s home server. Links to content aren’t what is actionable for a DMCA notice as far as I’m aware. And the DMCA does not require platforms to actively monitor or remove potentially infringing content, only to follow the takedown procedure when sent an appropriate notification. If they follow that then they are protected from liability. That’s US law but IIRC the implementations in most of the rest of the world are similar if not the same. And here’s the rub: even without those communities, LW will still need to have a DMCA agent and take action against content when notified because people can and will upload infringing media here on other communities.
They’re not exposing themselves to additional risk by having the piracy communities unblocked. People can and will discuss piracy, in abstract terms at the very least, all over the place. And discussion of copyright infringement is not copyright infringement anyway. Any liability and risk they do hold they will still have to worry about now regardless.
The ad hominem criticism is irrelevant. The communities should be removed or not removed based on the server’s policies regardless of who first raised the question.
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.
“we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more.”
This is an unfortunate aspect of individuals/small groups housing the fediverse vs big companies. Big companies have lawyers and the capital to back them, individuals do not.
If I was in your shoes, I’d do the same thing. I appreciate your wish for thus to be temporary. I hope you will share your findings once you come to a final decision; information like this is relevant to all those managing servers.
What needs to happen for you to be confident you won’t get in legal trouble, and thus unblock them? Change on the db0 side? Lemmy.world admins getting legal representation/advice? Something else? I’m curious how you all see this playing it out in the future.
Highly doubt there’s anything db0 can do. lemmy.world is in Europe, piracy has hefty legal ramifications.
Like you could argue that it isn’t piracy all you want, but if faced with the possibility of your hobby landing you decades in prison and millions in debt, would you do it?
Just create an account at db0, this really isn’t the big deal people make it out to be.
Not all of Europe. In most parts (especially Eastern Europe) the most you will get is a slap on the wrist if you are really really unlucky. And decades in prison aren’t a thing anywhere for simply sharing links to pirated content.
No one thinks of Eastern Europe as European beyond geography, excepting perhaps Eastern Europeans themselves.
Prison notwithstanding, financial ruin is a definite possibility.
People are making a mountain out of a molehill over this. The instance owner doesn’t want to risk any legal issues over hosting this instance, and I get that. Just create an account on db0 and use that. It’s not a big deal.
Instance admin isn’t some big corporation trying to silence your free speech. He’s just a dude that doesn’t want his hobby to bite him in the arse.
I don’t think I ever heard of a case where somebody has been condemned for piracy in Italy; I also know plenty of people who torrents/stream, yet none who uses a VPN to do so.
In Germany though, afaik, they are quite insane with their anti-piracy laws.
Discussing piracy isn’t illegal. It would be one thing if they were hosting pirated content, but they don’t even link to anything.
If that were to change I’d understand the decision, but this just seems silly to me.
as far as i have seen (as a subscriber to c/piracy) there is no links to pirated content and they are very clear that that is not allowed
the vast majority of the discussion is on morals of piracy, anti piracy measures, etc etc
I feel like there should be a major distinction between caching remote content and hosting that content yourself. Does Cloudflare get in trouble every time the FBI seizes a site that used Cloudflare routing, CDN, or caching? Not as far as I’m aware.
Soo ultimately you personally will be the only person determining what people can and can’t see, based on your perception alone. You don’t like something, you’ll ban it. You worry about something, you’ll ban it. And there won’t be a trace without you saying “we banned something”. Which means there are no checks at all to you powertripping in the future. How is this supposed to be free, open and general then? This is even worse than reddit was.
It’s their house, you’re just visiting. If they are concerned, there’s no one else to help. If they get in trouble, will you be stepping in to help them? No.
Once you start hosting an instance that has open registration, it’s not just “their house” anymore. They are providing a service to people. They do so willingly. Arbitrairly blocking instances because you don’t know how something works and don’t bother to check it isn’t the way to host a free and open instance.
Nah, their box, their responsibility, their rules. They could shut it off tomorrow, ban people randomly, change what posts are allowed, federate as they choose. We can’t do shit, and that’s fine cause we can each make our own instance or join another
Edit Any assumption you have durable rights or privileges is just untrue.
Yes, they offer access willingly, as in “at their will”
Edit would a downvoter be able to refute me? Are we in some sort of contracted relationship with instance admins?
You fucking donkey, did you read their comment before you replied to it? They aren’t doing it just because they want to; there are legal implications.
Rude
There really aren’t. Talking about piracy is allowed in Europe. Sharing stuff isn’t. This is a kneejerk reaction. Also, please don’t talk to people that way.
I will talk to rude people that harass the admins of a free service that way.
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.
Words are empty, offers are void in Nebraska. You already took steps against people who simply mostly discuss piracy. What concrete steps can you take now to show that you’d actually unblock “as soon as we know”?
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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.
In a world where Quad9 is in the middle of a giant lawsuit over simply serving DNS records, I can’t blame anybody for being extra cautious.
The great thing is, now you’re 100% empowered to move forward and host the responsibility yourself. Demanding volunteers shoulder potential liability (when you yourself admit you can’t understand how there’s any in the first place) is juvenile.
The moment a volunteer is hit with a DMCA notice or any threat of legal action, you think they have any interest in going through the court system? You can do it first.
I think you don’t understand what a DMCA notice actually is. The whole point of it is to give you a chance to remove offending content. The “threat” of legal action won’t actually result in anything, provided you comply, and that is exactly why I do not understand the preemptive actions, when there is basically no such thing as immediate legal threat in case of DMCA notices. The copyright holders often do not want to go through the court system either and will gladly accept pre-legal-action compliance.
The power of the panopticon lies not in being able to see and punish all deviant activity, but to encourage self-correction in all potential deviants who must always assume they are being watched.
You seem to know your way around the law then, so please be the change you want to see in this world. Host a piracy instance and show everyone here that we were wrong and that the admins were just overreacting.
I can openly admit I am breaking the law for example by using torrents for piracy - and I seed as much as I can, though it in theory makes me liable. So yes, I am the change I want to see - piracy should be free to discuss everywhere
You can go further: host a piracy instance since you seem confident enough and prove us wrong. Why are you avoiding this part? I’m not the only one having suggested this to you.
And here you are (after fighting with docker for an hour) http://pankuleczka.ydns.eu/
Server address not found.
Sure, if someone uses it then it’s no problem for me. There are much bigger communities already out there though, so I see no reason to do that. I’ll set it up right now to show you
Be the change you want to see -should be the catchphrase specifically for lemmy trolls
There are so many attacking lemmy world it’s getting ridiculous.
Criticism is not attacking. They made an unpopular decision for a flimsy reason. Its their right to do it, just like its their right to be wrong about it. But if they can’t handle mild criticism, then maybe hosting a lemmy instance was a bad idea.
I think lemmy world will be fine with mildly annoyed comments and a bunch of down votes.
I think you don’t understand what a DMCA notice actually is. The whole point of it is to give you a chance to remove offending content.
it really isn’t, the whole point is to streamline the capability for copyright holders to remove content they think they have rights to, without a lengthy court cases. it’s still a lot of overhead for any service to manage and also still opens you up to legal action.
From DMCA.com:
The document stipulates the content that has been stolen and republished without permission with a request for removal. It must be created and submitted in a specific manner so as to comply with the law. Failure to do so means the “notice” to remove the content will not be followed by any party involved in the infringement.
In exchange for the immediate removal of the content the publisher receives safe harbor from litigation regarding the illegal publication of copyrighted content.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with DMCA (a US law). Lemmy world is hosted in Germany which is even harsher on copyright than the US with much stricter penalties.
The world doesn’t revolve around the US.
It does have a lot with DMCA. Maybe not specifically the DMCA, but all the relevant regulations all around the world that are equivalent to DMCA because of copyright treaties. And yes, while you are right about Germany being more dangerous in terms of piracy (mainly because of copyright trolls), the relevant authority handling the case could very well be the USA court system.
I agree with the point, but US-wise, especially if you aren’t even the site actually as the source of truth for the community, you almost definitely don’t go to court unless you counterclaim. If you get a claim and nuke the offending communities in response (assuming you don’t have tools to block specific posts in the communities, but that would also work), you have protections built in.
Lemmyworld is hosted in Germany, they have agressive anti-piracy laws
Wasn’t it hosted in Finland? Or have things changed?
It’s both Finland and Germany iirc
The content is hosted on lemmy.world - that’s how the fediverse works. Each instance pushes updates to other instances and they host it locally for their users. The issue is that the admins here can’t moderate a community not on their instance. So if an instance is located somewhere it is legal, it might not be legal at the location of another instance.
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What content? You mean the comments generally discussing piracy? Because there’s no actual pirated content being hosted, or even linked to, in that community.
I have seen you comment in several comment chains. Please just understand that there is risk even if by the letter of the law everything is legal. There are plenty of cases with copyright / fair use where very expensive and long lawsuits were made against parties who did nothing illegal.
LW mods are clearly not comfortable with the risk with their current situation. Respect that, and don’t expect them to take risks beyond their comfort on your behalf. If you want someone who is willing to serve you content at that level of risk, you can create an account with one of the other communities.
Believe it or not, I do respect their decision. After all, this is their instance and it’s their right to decide what to do with it.
This is also a complete overreaction started by a transphobic troll account, that doesn’t actually protect anyone from anything. Both can be true.
Lemmy.world maintains a local copy of every external community. This is how federation works. Any piracy related posts on those subs will be copied in their entirety to lemmy.world servers, so lemmy.world could potentially be sued for hosting that content. Being the largest instance makes it a target.
It is rare to get advanced notice of legal problems. Usually the first you hear about it is a cease and desist, or a lawsuit. Lawsuits are costly to defend even if you’re doing nothing wrong.
I don’t like this decision. But it is a sensible one to protect the instance. If you care about piracy discussions you can visit those communities directly or on a different instance that made a different decision.
There is no suing for that, talking about piracy is perfectly legal. That’s called freedom of speech for your information
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. All it takes to have a lawsuit is to submit a filing fee to a court, and someone to serve the papers.
There are many lawsuits that are baseless. There are many lawsuits that are frivolous. If your instance is on the receiving end of one of these lawsuits you will have pay for a lawyer to defend yourself regardless of the merits of the case.
Courts don’t proactively decide whether someone can or cannot be sued.
Edit: I say this as not a not lawyer, and based on research into courts in the United States of America.
To encourage and aid in crimes is not covered by free speech in most countries like all of EU. And Lemmy.world is in Finland AFAIK.
One link in one discussion that slips through is basically enough.
Of course there is suing for that. You can sue for literally anything. They probably wouldn’t win such a lawsuit, but they can still file it, which means LW now needs to spend money to fight it.
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I enjoyed helping this place grow and doing my part to discuss here but I disagree with this decision and I’m going to evaluate looking for a different home instance.
What signs of legal trouble are you referring to?
Let’s also not ignore the fact that these communities literally prohibit Links or content from being posted to them. So even if people make the Federation argument about cross-hosting it’s all moot in the end because the community doesn’t allow it in the first place.
Here is a link to the rules of the Piracy community you will notice if you have any form of reading comprehension (or if you actually read it and aren’t just trolling, like many people here) that rule 3 specifically prohibits linking to or hosting files, which many people making the federated hosting argument seem to leave out of the equation, likely because it destroys their argument altogether since their argument is about illegal content being hosted, but no illegal content is hosted in the first place (and any that is usually is removed by the mods for breaking the rules, just like it is here on Lemmy.world).
I can’t understand how lemmy.world specifically would be the target of such legal action.
Because they’re the largest instance and therefore the biggest target.
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I think the problem is that because of the way that the fediverse, they ARE hosting the content. They effectively copy the content from that community onto their server to distribute it to all the users of their lemmy instance. So from a legal perspective they are hosting the content and they would be held liable for a distributing it.
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,
Thank you. It is appreciated.
Thank you for this
Misunderstanding eh?
Yeah. You misunderstood that they are liars.
Speaking of removed communities, can an admin respond to this please: https://lemmy.world/post/3165787
Aged like milk.
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Why are the thank you posts getting upthings when they provide no substance? I mean the tone above is not very nice but at least it highlights the need for migration tools.
Haha, damn.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Surely there is a discussion to be had around what is and isn’t allowed, there are plenty of subreddits discussing piracy without dolirect links that are playing within the rules.
Yeah I’m subbed to few piracy comms just because I like to see how that side of things is going. I’ve never seen anyone post or comment a link to a pirated file. I’ve never even seen anyone link to a website. It’s all been news and discussions and that’s it.
I’ve never seen anyone post or comment a link to a pirated file. I’ve never even seen anyone link to a website.
You ignored the “assistance in obtaining it” part, because members of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com have been doing that. Also:
EDIT: oh boy, shill posts a lie, innocent pirate mob upvotes. I literally post a proof that what he said is completely false, innocent pirate mob downvotes.
Are you trying to say I’m a shill? Lol wat.
I chimed in with my experience. You chimed in with one example expecting it to be the end all of the discussion.If you really want to talk about who does what, look at yourself asking for links to alternate apps for online services so you don’t have to pay for them. Someone’s been asking for assistance in obtaining things alright.
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my experience
Which is very far from reality. I literally just opened the community and randomly found that thread, I didn’t even have to try hard. You tried too hard to make them look good here:
I’ve never seen anyone post or comment a link to a pirated file. I’ve never even seen anyone link to a website. It’s all been news and discussions and that’s it.
Also, maximum cringe here:
look at yourself asking for links to alternate apps
And, so what?
Why are you so butthurt? I want even going to respond to your comment because I read it and thought fair enough.https://lemmy.world/post/3206301
This is asking for the same exact thing that your apparently so upset over.Chill.
butthurt
It does seem to me that you’re the one who’s butthurt because I called you a shill though? You literally lied, I don’t even see why you still reply. Also, very pathetic of you to compare using an alternative front-end with something that’s clearly illegal.
Yeah dude you totally caught me lying. Everything is falling apart not that you’ve exposed me lol
The above comment says:
I’ve never seen anyone post or comment a link to a pirated file.
proceeds to post a screenshot where they just name the site and not the particular content.
I’ve never even seen anyone link to a website
you missed this part, you’re all trying too hard here
I think some of you have no idea how legal issues will occur. Unless you are linking actual content or the (direct) link to the copyright infringing content, you will not be having any legal issues. That’s why big piracy discussion subreddits in reddit ike r/piracy are not taken down yet.
Even YouTube has copyright infringing content. Now will .world get any legal notice for linking that? No. Will .world get a legal notice for having comments or posts having a direct YouTube link to the copyright infringing content? Yes. That’s how things work.
Hope you guys understand that instead of slamming every reasonable comment.
Especially because discussing copies of your own data also happens in such communities. There must be clear guidelines what can and cannot be discussed. Also, it would have been nice to have those communities selfregulate. For example, giving them 30 days to comply, e.g. removing any content that breaks the law.
Because the fediverse i about democracy. If laws stand in the way of democracy since they have been brought up by governments influenced by global corporations (which are by definition autocratic) then they must be ignored.
So, striking a balance to not get anyone in trouble while not working for IP holders is the way.
Because the fediverse i about democracy.
Isn’t it, like, the opposite? With the main assumption being that you should find an instance that aligns with your interests and values, not find an instance and try to vote for it to become something you like? That is technically “voting with your feet” but instances don’t actually need a large population to stay running.
But we have no tools to migrate users or communities. We can not vote with our feet so much as start over and over and over.
I highly recommend people go to the issue relating to account migration on the lemmy software github and explain why account Migration is as important as it is and should not be considered as a second thought. Not being able to migrate ties you to an instance if you’ve been there long or participated a lot, it makes you dependent on them, this is not a good dynamic to have in the Fediverse, it’s why other platforms like Mastodon have profile migration.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.
You’re not wrong. It’s not the same as voting for a desired outcome and if owners/admins push for something, they can usually get it until people leave.
But the system is open source so they can’t just shape their server how they like. They can’t keep others from getting news from outside and they also can’t push their own agenda imo.
So I‘d say you‘re right, it’s not „democracy“ but its either something else entirely or it is „about democracy“. Maybe power equality through federation?
What it’s about, in my opinion, is trust. To tie it back to Reddit yet again - on Reddit, if the admins of the site did something, their word was final and there wasn’t much you could do about it. On Lemmy, if the admins of an instance do something, even here on the biggest one, their reach is limited to their own space; they cannot affect what happens beyond. This means that instead of having to do a big ol exodus to try and prop up a new network, people can just pick another instance and continue where they left off, outside the reach of the admins that did the thing they dislike.
Therefore, the instance admins and the users (and also the mods) need to actually have trust in each other to stick around, as there are viable alternative spaces they can go to if that trust is broken. Additionally, the entire concept of federation is also built on trust - “we will allow an exchange of content between our instances because we trust you”.
I don’t agree with this decision, but I understand it, and I still trust LW admins because they’ve had a good track record so far. For those reasons I’ll stay here. I don’t fault anyone leaving, though, if their personal threshold of trust has been broken. The only thing I’m really wary of is the free-speech absolutists that insist no one should be defederated from; the tool exists for a reason. There’s not many of them, though.
I agree on practically everything you wrote there. Thanks.
I‘d like to add that I was a little upset first by their childish action but then came to the conclusion that they in fact have very little power compared to the whole platform. So yes, it‘s still not ok (and I would be furious if my content just gets deleted) but it is not that big of a deal.
It’s only about democracy if you make your own instance. Otherwise, you have to follow the rules of wherever you’re signed up.
If you make your own instance, as a one-man thing, then it’s not really democracy at all either. The only way it would be democracy is if you made your own instance and specifically said “all decisions will be made via vote” and you actually had users around to participate in those votes.
Your instance is your vote in the fediverse as a whole.
A vote for what, though? What is being decided, and by who?
You are deciding what content you want to see. If you’re on an instance run by someone else, that will never be under your control.
Yes. The thing is there is zero content breaking the law, so they would have looked ridiculous
From the other comments here I think these people are not very smart. Probably should make new sailor sub somewhere else soon. Obviously with relatively strict rules. For example: only trackers, no direct links etc. (I‘m not a pro at this. What I know is from reading)
Sure. But we’re a group of volunteers and we would not like to find out the hard way what is possible and what not. We would think meta discussions about piracy should be allowed as long as there is no linking to actual illegal content.
But is pointing to locations with illegal content legal or not? And having members/admins worldwide it makes it even harder to be sure.We don’t want to find out the hard way and this is a better safe than sorry measure. Again we personally have nothing against the people on these communities or against the communities itself.
should go ahead and ban image uploading to lemmy.world, as there is likely a ton of illegal, copyright-violating content that hasn’t been stress-tested for fair use.
The music community could be an issue for the same reason, this logic is problematic
Smart, might as well shut down this whole thread then as we’re discussing piracy here too, right?
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.
to an entity with greater legal capabilities?
Someone who has the necessary legal capabilities is going to be a corporation. And that’s exactly why we left Reddit.
No. In Germany we have something called gGmbH. It’s basically a non-profit Limited. But IANAL, no idea if and how this would be able to protect the admins.
So this nonprofit is going to run the largest Lemmy instance?
I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t.
I guess I don’t see any reason why it would.
Yikes. Bit trigger happy with the ban hammer there. It’s at -40, isn’t that filtering enough?
Edit: it was an instance ban initially, this is more reasonable.
Eesh if posting a slightly hurtful comment is enough to get an entire instance ban… I wasn’t going to move home instance just because of those communities but the bans is way more of an eye opener.
I support your decision. Want to see the new instances that will pop up now hosted by your critics 😄
Yeah. Talk is cheap. Running a server is hard work.
The fact that there was no announcement before the banning of the communities is not great, but good on you for acknowledging that mistake.
It’s unfortunate that this action had to be done, but it’s also understandable. It’s not about what’s right or wrong, and it’s not even about whether there actually is any illegal content in these communities. It’s about the fact that the Big Entertainment Companies don’t care about the difference and see it ALL as bad, irregardless of whether it actually is illegal or not. If the admin team had a legal team and the financial security to fight back, then it wouldn’t be as much of an issue. But they’re not, they’re just a bunch of regular folks, so they’re being cautious and trying to pre-emptively prevent these problems from coming up, especially as Lemmy continues to grow every day.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that you can always switch instances or make an alt account.
Thanks for only banning the communities and not the entire instance as a whole. That is a much healthier approach to deferation.
I don’t understand why people are upset even a little about this. This is a prefect advert for the fediverse. If you are not completely happy with an instance(which can never realistically happen) then you just host your own or have multiple accounts. Apps have this built in and easily accessible. Why do people want to concentrate everything they want into one instance? What if that instance goes down? This should not be hated or applauded… just ignored as the way the fediverse should work. Don’t get too attached to any single instance.
Lovely this happened because someone complained after being banned from the piracy instance for being a transphobic asshole.
The people whining are not the people that could face multimillion-dollar lawsuits over the issue. Like it or not, media companies are powerful and will go after websites seen as promoting piracy. Do what you reasonably have to do.
While I’m not ethically opposed pirating, I understand and would probably do the same for a server I was hosting. Anybody remember Kim Dotcom’s mansion raid?
What I do not understand is blocking a community surrounding magic mushrooms… No one is going to prosecute the L.W admins for people discussing shrooms/their use…
Substances are legal/illegal depending on where one lives, just like weed which is apparently perfectly fine to post here, even tho possession is a death sentence in some countries.
It simply doesn’t logically follow that weed, or even alcohol communities are permissible while a shroom community is not.
Banning any content deemed illegal in any country in the world establishes a very dangerous precedence (if that’s the justification here). Free speech/dissenting from the government is illegal in many places in the world.
One thing the community must remember tho, is that you have to operate your server in accordance with the law in which country you’re hosting it (in this case Germany).
I’ll gladly admit I’m not too familiar with German law, but it seems unreasonable to expect government persecution for hosting servers which hosts a shroom discussion community.
Ight, I’m out
