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.
So why is that a problem? The hosts of Lemmy.world aren’t beholden to provide you with every resource available and at the same time potentially expose themselves to legal issues.
Problem is that saying Lemmy.world is responsible for these communities is not a valid argument. They do not run these communities nor are they affiliated with them. As a lemmy instance, they didn’t have to do anything technically speaking. And even then, Reddit - which is centralized - was able to get away with these communities for years.
While it is true they are not directly responsible for these communities, they are linking to them through federation. As others have mentioned, lemmy.world is hosted in Germany where laws are stricter around linking to potentially illegal activities. They don’t have the legal team available to them that Reddit do so obviously they want to protect themselves. If it’s a problem to you, sign up with an instance that doesn’t block that type of content.
Well I am already talking to you from lemm.ee lol
Anyways, I’m not sure if “linking to illegal content” in this manner is really a fair way to do it, kind of reminds me of the Quad9 and Sony Story :/