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.
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 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.
The Lemmy instance doesn’t actually host pirated content, does it? It’s just information about pirated content and where to find it, right? Who the fuck cares about this
Links to pirated content have been deemed illegal in various jurisdictions. That said, the piracy community on Lemmy doesn’t seem to do much more than complain about DRM, so I guess the risk shouldn’t be that high?
Still, the best way to avoid annoying letters from lawyers is to avoid risky communities. Hosting anything related to piracy, gambling, porn, or crime is just a pain, even more so than hosting normal stuff.
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.
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.
Got the state correct 👍
Neat. Has anyone brought this up to the devs here or on github before?
you could safeguard against this on the client side by not loading images from untrusted sources. irc clients did this
I’m not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don’t know about this.
The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that’s not implemented.
Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I’m not sure why this feature was removed again. I can’t find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you’re curious.
i really wish there were a way to disable images with some of these fancy lemmy clients for android. I’m not interested in any of them
If you use Sync, there’s this setting you can toggle to disable embedded images. I’m not sure if this protects against network requests, but I think it should? If you disable the, images are represented as links instead.
nice. yea it replaces your image with a link.
Oof, yeah that’s bad…
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.
But of they federated they’ll be hosting a copy.
Ok so we have basically created a reddit with extra retardation and uploaded to a blockchain.
I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?
You might not have to pay damages. But you’re probably going to have to pay a hefty legal fee not to pay damages.
Copyright laws are actually very difficult to enforce when it comes to digital piracy. You have to prove loss of profit among other things.
Then, who do you sue? The person downloading the product? The person hosting the product? The person providing a link to the hosted data? The person providing a platform for people to link things? The person who allows their platform to federate with another platform that does?
If we’re talking about P2P sharing, then in a way no one is hosting the data.
In Australia when the Dallas Buyers Club case was being looked at, the studio was asking for a lot of money. Basically a big fat fine to be paid. The judge threw it out saying that the only reasonable damages for one person to pay would be the cost of the DVD because that was the value of the “theft”.
You dont have to enforce it.
You just have to drown people in legal bills and force them into compliance with risk of bankruptcy.
thepiratebay.org is still up
they did go to prison tho
their apartment in Malmö looked and smelled like a triceratops hibernated in there, by the way
I don’t know enough about law to know how that does or does not work, but it that’s possible then any entity with enough money can actively bankrupt anyone they want, and it won’t have anything to do with why. If that’s true could you not just sue someone by making stuff up and force them to prove you made it up?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have limitless money to pay lawyers
Comments like this sound like the “they write it off on tax” comments, where there’s this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can’t work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.
The pirates will simply move to another Lemmy Instance and re-create the group there. This is the advantage of having a decentralized platform: so one person or small group of people can’t ruin things for the rest of us.
These communities not on .world.
They are: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com !piracy@lemmy.ml !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Pirates will not move the communities. The communities are fine where they are. People will need to create accounts on the host instances or instances that haven’t blocked those communities.
deleted by creator
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.
IIRC they banned piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com months ago. Not sure why it pops up again in the modlog. It was the reason I left lemmy.world.
I believe they reversed course on that ban. It’s just recently that they reverse reversed that course.
Stop crying about it and just join a new instance, pretty simple.
Yeah that. And I say it as someone who, on a good day, will go on philosophical rambles about how piracy is in fact the moral thing to do.
Do people just not get that this is the entire point of a decentralized system?
Hop accounts, you lil’ bitch. Don’t sit in one server complaining about the owner of that server when you have a billion options.
And if your priority is the piracy community? Make the server that hosts that your homeserver.
Or just have more than one account and use an app instead of the default webpage.
It’s not rocket science. People’s brains are poisoned by centralization. Back in my day everything was its own separate forum with its own separate account and to be honest, it was miles better like that.
The problem with this is that it isn’t really decentralized equally. Lemmy.world has most of the users and getting defederated from them is essentially a death sentence in terms of content and engagement.
I think it’s a good idea to make new accounts on other instances, I plan to buy without a proper amount of people, lemmy.world is working the same way reddit did.
Hopefully this will drive people to switch to another instance, and the issue you mentions will be less present.
The problem with this is that it isn’t really decentralized equally. Lemmy.world has most of the users and getting defederated from them is essentially a death sentence in terms of content and engagement.
Self-resolving issue here. If people hop away from LW due to LW making decisions they don’t like, LW will cease being the one-go-to-place for stuff. Which is good, it shouldn’t be. No one instance should be “the main instance”. The right way to use federation is each person & community should make their home at a place where they vibe just right with the fed admins.
Also also – Defederation is a far more nuanced thing than just “is block”. There is more than one tool that can be used by an ActivityPub admin.
If LW defederates from your home instance – You can still manually follow communities that are in LW AND interact with them (unless the admins go out of their way to ALSO block USERS from your home instance), as “defederated from the instance” just removes it from the global timeline/global community search.
What happened here, though, wasn’t defederation, it was a block, and a block on two specific communities, which outright prevents viewing & interacting with content from those communities from within LW. Which brings me to: LW’s block on the piracy communities from dbzer0 doesn’t stop LW users from interacting with dbzer0 as a whole. Or vice-versa. Only with stuff from the piracy coms.
Reddit syndrome still affects a lot of users here, who view having multiple accounts on different answers as an inconvenience instead of a feature of the platform design. The irony is that tons of users on Reddit had lots of accounts without batting an eye, but that extra step of having to lick a new instance is just SO complicated.
It’s a major inconvenience and I’ll stick to one. If it can’t be accessed from Lemmy.world it’s not really my problem tbh and I’ll just act like it doesn’t exist.
I’ve never noticed any defederation from my instance or drama aside from the main posts talking about it, and if you came here interested in a piracy community it’s good for that, lemmy.dbzer0.com. “Lemmy.World” seems to be where all the drama happens hah. I have only ever made one account, interact with several different instances without issue. I agree using several accounts would be annoying.
It is an inconvenience. Having to track which account can view which communities, with all the drama and defederation happening each week isn’t easy.
Centralized Reddit brain poison tbh.
Your password manager will keep track of your credentials. If you have THAT MUCH trouble keeping track of which communities are on which server, stick to local communities.
Back in the day we had everything be its own separate forum and no one died from that. You’re just lazy.
Nice bait dude.
You being incorrect and stupid is not bait.
Indeed. There are lots of proposals for perfectly portable decentralized user identities, subscriptions that transcend specific instances, and whatnot, but until those things actually arrive that’s not the Fediverse we’re dealing with. It’s a hassle having to switch instances.
Picking a better instance for your main is most advisable. Users can accept that the primary benefit of a free and open source federated service can also sometimes inconvenience them, or they cannot. Complaining about the core mechanic of the technology that literally cannot change is silly IMO. Corporate owned centralization leads to enshittification. Your account age indicates that you know that first hand.
I did that the last time and moved here ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Better management, no censorship, better uptimes and quicker upgrades, no need to look back (I moved “momentarily”).
Here being where exactly?
I think “here” being the instance their account is on, https://lemm.ee
Yep :)
I forgot some apps or frontends might not show up instance names next to usernames.
quicker upgrades
That’s an important one, especially with how long it took LW to upgrade. I completely get why it’s more challenging for them due to their number of users, but that could be an argument for enthusiastic users to move elsewhere.
Make sure to cancel and if possible refund your donations to Lemmy.world before doing that as well. No reason to give them money if you’re not going to use them anymore. I canceled mine when this all started happening the first time.
You… Got a refund on a donation? Wow…
I never said I got a refund on my donation, I’m saying if someone just donated they might want to try getting a refund on it in addition to canceling.
If I may ask, why still use .world then?
Great question, see when instances have management level disagreements like this there really isn’t any purpose to using their communities from a remote account.
Unlike a lot of people who “migrated” I realize it ultimately doesn’t make a difference using these communities from a remote server because they are controlled by this one and ultimately will be affected by defederations and bans. So I only migrated my non-lemmy.world subscriptions to the other instance accounts and left the local ones on this account.
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.
…you can just change instances. World did this before and I that’s how I ended up on this account/instance.
Transparency is there in the sense that the modlog makes clear that a lemmy.world admin blocked the community. If it were Reddit we’d never know how, just that it is blocked.
Talk about moving the goalposts. The lemmy.world admins promised not to do this again without community consultation, then just went ahead and did it anyway. Just because we have the modlog doesn’t excuse the breach of commitment.
I’m aware of this broken promise. My comment is speaking specifically on a limited technical basis when comparing it to Reddit, which is what I mean by “in a sense”. I hope this clarifies it for you.
*than *than
Lemmy suffers from pretty much every issue that Reddit suffers from. To think Lemmy is special or somehow insulated from this is the most naive thing I’ve ever seen.
That’s weird, I haven’t seen u/spez around here lately.
Reddit was great for at least 5-10 years, the main issue that caused everyone to leave was that it became corporatized and had to start making a profit. That can literally never happen on Lemmy, because it’s free and decentralized. So yes, Lemmy is special and insulated from corporate abuse. If you can’t understand the value of that, you may as well go back to reddit.
It’s not free of corporatist behaviour though, especially on the large instances. This is a classic example. I guess at least people can vote with their feet, and still stay on the fediverse.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. The Lemmy experience is quickly beginning to sour. They’ve received an influx of trolls and I’ve run into a few moderators now that seem to be taking harsh actions. Maybe Lemmy isn’t for me after all.
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.
Hey it’s a free world. You’re welcome to migrate to a different instance. Heck why not run your own? That’s the power of the fediverse. Or just head back to Reddit.
Lol the Lemmy hivemind is just as fucking stupid as the Reddit hivemind. The fact that you got massively down voted for showing ANY negativity towards Lemmy as a whole proves this.
“People disagree with me! I must be right because they’re uhhhh triggered! Yeah!”
Conservative-ass viewpoint
yep I got downvoted, as expected. More proof. What’s a surprise. Just like Reddit
Where have I heard it before? If my memory serves me right, it was very popular cope on another discussion platform. What a surprise. Just like Reddit.
“dOwNvoTeS pROvE mE rIgHt”
did you think you’re going to get a hero’s welcome?
Maybe you guys are getting downvoted for conflating Lemmy on the fediverse as a whole with Lemmy.World.
These actions don’t affect anyone not on Lemmy.world, assuming db0 federates with you, !piracy is still there for you
The thing is, this actually if anything proves the strength of the fediverse. Lemmy.world is not Lemmy and Lemmy is not the fediverse. Just find another instance that has not blocked the community yet and carry on with your day.
Lemmy.world have every right to curate the experience for their users as they see fit and/or feel comfortable carrying the risk for.
They do of course have that right, but they should at a minimum follow their previously stated commitments to consult their users before taking actions like this.
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.
…if your metric is admin transparency, how the hell do you figure that Lemmy is worse than Reddit…?
I feel like Lemmy falls short in a lot of ways but transparency is not one of them
.ml is terrible. They actively ban people who aren’t tankies. Reasonable discussion is not allowed there. If there is one instance that should be defederated it is .ml
>They actively ban people who aren’t tankies.
this seems unlikely.
I’ve seen multiple posts from people who were banned from .ml and I looked at the removed comments and modlog myself, and people are being banned for even mild general discussion of topics debating the legitimacy of totalitarian communist policy.
this doesn’t show :
They actively ban people who aren’t tankies.
in fact, for evidence to the contrary, one of the biggest anarchism communities is on lemmy.ml
I’m not a tankie, and I haven’t been banned.
You sure you’re not confused with lemmygrad?
Yes I know a lot of people on .ml are not tankies but .ml admin is repeatedly banning anti tankie discussion. See my other comment above. Look at the modlogs and you’ll find people being banned for critical thinking. I blocked the instance because Lemmy <> lemmy.ml . The code can always be forked.
User accounts can be migrated to new instances with version 19
This is why you don’t sign up with the biggest possible instances, eventually they will become the biggest possible bottleneck in a network. Anything dot world admins do will affect all of their users, that shouldn’t be surprising 🤷
As for dbzer0, this might affect users in the short term but eventually people will figure out how to access the sub from more friendly instances.
I updated my post after another user stated that it wasn’t lemmy.world admins that performed the ban but the db0 team that did. I can’t say with certainty that’s actually the case since the modlog is pretty opaque and I don’t have full knowledge of how [federated] actions are propagated & displayed.
I (incorrectly?) assumed since those communities had existed for so long on the dbzer0 instance they had at least tacit approval from the admins there and were in communication with them enough that a full ban wouldn’t occur – when I saw the removal in the modlog I didn’t even consider that possibility.
Sorry for kicking up drama here if the Lemmy.World team had no part in this :(
When you check the mod logs and filter by mod you can see that it came from Mr. Kaplan which is a lemmy.world admin.
So yes it was a lemmy.world decision. The question is whether or not this admin was a lone actor.
Here is the modlog: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity
Seems to have been made by a mod from LW indeed
Sigh… if “indirectly linking” is prohibited then literally the entire web breaks.
… again.
Great thing about the fediverse is that you have options when admin/moderation actions occur that you don’t agree with. If Reddit were to remove /r/piracy then we’d have no recourse
Very true…as long as the federation of servers remains as it is now, but I’m increasingly worried it won’t.
I mean, yes, Dbzer0 still exists, and yes, you can access it from other instances, but Lemmy.world is the biggest one and users here being cut off from it from here will strangle the amount of activity it gets. Visibility is important for the health of other instances and their communities. There’s a good reason why alternative subreddits never outgrow the main ones.
Yes and no. While it’s true that piracy might not get “drive-by” traffic from l.w. users, those users who become aware of it, or who want to access it will be forced to create an account elsewhere than l.w. which will also help with redistributing users to smaller instances.
Does removing mean defederate?
No. Every community is hosted by a server, just as every user account is. Removing a community is similar to banning a user.
So it just means that lemmy.world users can no longer see that specific community, right?
yep.
No, it means the community no longer functions and most posts to it aren’t available on other servers either. You can view some remnants of it on other servers, but I’m not sure what will happen if you try to post to them.
No that’s not correct because the community they banned was not on their instance.
All this does is prevent Lemmy.World users from using our seeing the community. Everyone else is unaffected.
I misunderstood which community was being discussed. You’re correct.
- A server banning a community it hosts effectively destroys that community
- A server banning a community it does not host makes that server’s users unable to interact with it
That’s very similar to banning a user.
It’s the other way around, you linked another community. The correct community, visible from SJW: https://sh.itjust.works/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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
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.
Did the admins state anything? I thought the issue here is that LW previously did something without an announcement, undid it and promised to communicate before doing something like that again, and now people are saying they haven’t communicated this time.
That’s the real issue, not the fact that it was defederated.
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.
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
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
The point was transparency, don’t try to distract from the issue.
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.
removing pictures really seems like a bit of a nightmare after reading that.
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.
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
I think you got the wrong person, the copyright guy is someone else.
I’ve seena few people doing it, but I (and literally any companies scraping instances for content) just lol and move on.
I feel like I’ve only seen one, maybe two people doing it, but I guess there might’ve been more.
ZUCKERBERG HAS NO LEGAHL AUTHROITEE YO MY UPLOADS I RETAIN ALL OWNERSHIP FOR EVERYTHING.
This is how the real world works
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.
🤣
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?
You know the meme where Bender goes, “I’ll do my own thing, with Blackjack and hookers!”
Lemme provides that. Servers are managed by different groups and you can absolutely make your own, with blackjacks and hookers.
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.
It’s honestly a bit pathetic that your admin didn’t have the guts to actually ask the lemmy.world user base before banning us for the second time, even though your instance promised to consult it’s user base before doing anything like this again. “Facilitation of piracy” is not even illegal in most jurisdictions, because it’s so vague. I mean the internet itself facilitates piracy. It’s only hosting pirated content that is technically illegal, and we don’t do that. We just talk about the topic. Talking about piracy ≠ hosting pirated content.
I’m not from lemmy.world, I’m from sh.itjust.works. We have never banned you at all. And I understand your argument.
But it’s not our place to decide what the lemmy.world admins do with their server. It also doesn’t affect you personally at all. It’s not like they defederated your server, it only affects their users who were subscribed to that community, and they can always just make an account on another server.
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 definitely has. Hopefully this decision will nudge people into other instances.
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.
If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized.
What makes you think that? I abandoned my kbin account because all the content is on lemmy and I don’t feel like waiting 4 hours to get that content on kbin. People will go where the content is.
That’s just because kbin doesn’t work properly though. One reason why things are centralized is because there are only so many servers that actually work well.
Events like this removal of the piracy community will naturally cause people to spread out over time. You could even see people try to spread out on reddit by making new subs when they chafed at the rules.
The more people we have, the more diverse we will become, and thus it will be necessary to create new servers to accommodate these different types of people. That’s my instinct, but there are many different ways it could go.
Content loads just as fast on small subs as on large subs. Not so for instances. I think centralization is inevitable unless federated data transfer gets faster.
Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won’t “decentralize” naturally.
Sometimes people centralize, and sometimes they decentralize. They are both natural social behaviors.
If people naturally gravitate to the place everyone is, why are we all on Lemmy instead of reddit? Why do I have absolutely no desire to be a part of lemmy.world, where everyone else is? People are not all the same.
Reddit has corporate lawyers. Lemmy does not.
Reddit’s piracy community doesn’t discuss the practical stuff like dbzero’s does
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?”When you receive a takedown / DMCA / whatever legal mumbo-jumbo applies to your jurisdiction, you have two choices:
Comply immediately Fight it in court
You actually have a third option: file a DMCA Counternotice. If my reading is correct, the very act of filing the counternotice allows you to keep the content up unless the original filer “insists” (it’s the mechanism against “DMCA trolling”). DMCAis not a jail-free card to erase content from the internet.
Possibly, but the DMCA is strictly a US thing. The comply or fight in court are the only two somewhat universal options.
Other countries have other similar laws, though. LW’s TOS says they’re under legal jurisdiction of Finland, The Netherlands, and Germany. Not sure what their laws are like, but Germany seems pretty strict about it.
Could be, but still it reeks of overreaction. Without the need of seeing anything else, it’s almost impossible that Germany’s law is that strict that “linking to (discussion of) pirated material” would be off, since if that was the case Google would be making Germany rich with their fines, which doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s even worse when it comes down to saying “discussing or mentioning” internet piracy would be illegal - under the way copyright holders themselves understand it, this would mean mentioning the market of secondhand sales would be illegal in such jurisdictions.
Yeah, until LW addresses it, all we can really do is guess. I’ve just jumped to the most logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s even close.
For what it’s worth, as an instance admin myself: I don’t get paid to run it, I have other things to worry about, and most definitely don’t have time or energy to deal with copyright BS. That said, I can completely understand their position and reaction.
Depending on how my day was going, I’d have also probably “shot first and asked questions later” with regard to removing the community and waiting until I had time to compose a post about it and be present to deal with the inevitable drama that would cause.
Hopefully they make an announcement soon.
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.
You don’t even need to leave .world, you can subscribe to communities on other instances.
“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”
Remember: Pretty much every Lemmy instance is run by volunteers that don’t have legal departments
One lawsuit can shut them down.
Never understood people who don’t get this.
As a person who is part of open source communities, on various chairs and donates, the money is extremely slim, and the people involved just want to build cool things.
We are busy trying to keep the lights on for hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy this service. And if a small group of troublemakers force us to get a strong legal threat, we aren’t risking the the project’s survival.
Especially when we don’t know the troublemakers, don’t have any connection with them, they don’t contribute to the platform, etc.
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.
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.
Linking to or posting content that’s illegal or in violation of copyright should not be allowed, but you don’t have to ban an entire community to do that, you just have to enforce the same rules that are in place for every other community on here. Maybe someone can explain this to me, but this seems equivalent to banning a cybersecurity community because encryption get used by bad actors sometimes, so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned since information about staying anonymous online is “sharing the tools and techniques” that could be used in assisting criminal activity. Ditto for cryptocurrency, ditto for secure operating systems, ditto for drugs, guns, and any number of other things where community discussion is allowed but illegal activity is not. I understand the need to draw the line at actually sharing copyrighted content, but discussion of lockpicks or linking to sites that sell lockpicks is not equivalent to going around illegally picking locks, except it seems that is exactly the case when it comes to piracy but no other topics.
this seems equivalent to banning a cybersecurity community because encryption get used by bad actors sometimes, so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned
using your analogy; it’s like banning access to a piracy community because sometimes pirates use it…
pirates sometimes use meme communities too, but those aren’t banned, and .world isn’t completely defederated from db0, so that’s not it.
so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned since information about staying anonymous online is “sharing the tools and techniques” that could be used in assisting criminal activity.
staying anonymous online is not a crime though. copyright infringement is a crime. that’s why the analogy doesn’t make sense.
scenario is: people are linking to law-breaking content in x-community. therefore, .world is choosing to ban said x-community that facilitates it, to prevent legal liability.
I understand the need to draw the line at actually sharing copyrighted content, but discussion of lockpicks or linking to sites that sell lockpicks is not equivalent to going around illegally picking locks, except it seems that is exactly the case when it comes to piracy but no other topics.
you’re right, while lock picking can be illegal, it’s not always illegal. however, copyright law violations are always illegal.
this law-breaking content happens to be copyright infringement/piracy material. another example a host might ban would be a community that is linking to CP, or a community that is linking to Identity theft sources, etc. even if it’s just users posting links to this sort of content, I can understand a host not wanting to expose themselves to any sort of legal liability.
It’s not as easy as moderating individual posts. Remember, Lemmy is decentralized. If you start your own Lemmy server and I federated with it, I’ll get all the stuff you post on my instance too (intentionally oversimplified).
Its up to you to moderate communities on your instance the way you see fit, and up to me to moderate mine. Even though our instances are federated, I can’t moderate on your behalf. It just isn’t feasible both in terms of the technology and in terms of the sheer volume of content you would have to try to moderate.
If you have a community that posts a mix of things I agree with and things I don’t, I really only have a couple options on my end. Basically I can block that community on my instance or block your instance altogether.
The reason why someone might block a community may be more about the legal risk than any moral justification. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to even host that information. And since Lemmy instances cache posts from other instances, it could be argued that because that community is federated with your instance, you’re responsible for the content posted there.
That’s all well and good, I agree with virtually all you said. It’s certainly the admins’ right to block or de-federate any community they want, based on risk or just because they feel like it, I have no issue with that. It’s simply my personal belief that discussion of crime is not a crime. Direct links to illegal content should not be allowed, but discussion about piracy in general should carry no more risk that learning about murder in a criminology class, which does not need to be banned just because it’s teaching people things they could in theory use to get away with murder.
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.
“No! I refuse to open more than one site! If it’s not on this one site that I have decided amounts to the entire threadiverse then it doesn’t exist, how dare people make me think? The absurdity of it all!”
.world users doing their thing. It’s fine for a starter but not someplace to stay
Absolutely! Does anyone have any suggestions for general instances that don’t censor as much as lemmy.world?
This is a great site to find instances:
cum