cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/2881638
The largest piracy community is hosted over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
lemmy.world has blocked it. It appears to have also blocked !piracy@lemmy.ml.
If this is a problem for you, I’d suggest migrating accounts using LASIM to an instance that doesn’t block it (such as lemm.ee).
edit:
An official announcement has been made:
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.
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!
Reddit has the money to fight a legal battle. Volunteers running a site off donations do not. They don’t want to take risks and that’s understandable
I guess so but there is no law to reasonably sue them with because nothing in those communities is illegal…
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Absolutely but teaching others to pirate isn’t, it’s illegal for a platform to host copyrighted content and it’s illegal to host direct links to contents, NOT links to sites that host links to content or even the content itself…
That’s not what the poster is talking about. Whether the piracy subreddit or the lemmy community, there are strict rules about sharing copyrighted content, asking for it or posting links to it. These communities are about discussing different technologies around BitTorrent, usenet or debrid and how to leverage them to share content.
All of the above can be used for perfectly legal reasons such as sharing Linux ISOs or public domain media.
If you use those to pirate copyrighted content that’s your decision.
Calling these communities illegal and blocking them is akin to schools not permitting students to use backpacks or lockers because they could be used to hide guns.
Exactly, nothing those communities do is illegal!
It’s weird seeing otherwise normal working class people rush to defend admins, moderators, governments and authorities all the time in situations like this. I’m imagining some college kids working at starbucks or grocery stores picking up their phone in between customers posting replies championing copyright law. It’s embarrassing
As an administrator of many different public-facing services I’m always going to defend other admins right to moderate their services in whatever manner makes them comfortable, even if I don’t agree with their decision.
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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.
lemmy.world is hosted in Finland hence they don’t probably live in us
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.
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)
You still need expensive lawyers to defend yourself. Registering a LLC isn’t a get out of jail free card and corporations don’t shield you from personal criminal liability (unless you’re rich, see comment about expensive lawyers).
I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?
No. .world is just afraid of everything. Better they shut down their instance.
You all can leave .world whenever you want to; nothing’s stopping you
It’s literally better for everyone to be more spread out, including Lemmy.world.
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. 🙄
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.
It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc.
Hmmm
Okay, you’re not on Reddit anymore where things are just easy because they spent time to figure it out. Fediverse is just a fledging group of sites that are getting an influx of users, while still trying to figure out both their instance, and cooperative rules that fit both their values and the wants/needs of their users. You want a well oiled machine, jump back into the mainstream where they use your data to personalize the adds they place between all the things you want to see. Or, you can go with the flow as this new ecosystem forms, sans ads, and free of data collection.
It’s fine if you’re not ready.
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.
Also, they don’t ask for your email! A friend told me that.
I don’t think that makes sense if you’re worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can’t interact with large communities).
No I swear I just have an account there for all the SFW stuff!!!
It wasn’t the largest when some of us joined…
There was 1000 people about when I signed up.
I don’t remember where it was for me, but I do remember it being the hop-on point for me into Lemmy because it was already well populated, so I figured it meant “good”. Now that I understand lemmy better, I’ve realized I don’t need to patron it anymore - there are better instances for me. I suspect that this is a good thing that something is causing users to move. I’m sure .world is the face of fediverse, or at least lemmy, for many at this point and will continue to grow in user base. Maybe losing users on the back end will satisfy the DDOS attackers, and also lighten the load while .world’s admin get it figured out.
Maybe this is a natural process of the fediverse?
Maybe this is a natural process of the fediverse?
on the mastodon side at least quite a few people started off on mastodon.social and migrated over to smaller instances (or in some cases migrated to entirely different software families like pleroma or misskey)
i’d go as far as to say (jokingly ofc) that you aren’t a true member of the fediverse if you didn’t migrate at least once
This is basically what I did not that long ago.
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
“I’m a free speech absolutist” - everyone who isn’t a free speech absolutist, especially when it costs them nothing.
Because our culture wants everything for free
So I’ve seen u/loudWaterEnjoyer suggest the Divisions by zero instance, which I applied for (be sure to follow the vetting rules!), and u/Historical_General mentioned and suggested the lemm.ee and lemmy.ml instances, but it appears that the .ml TLD throws a “registration_closed” error…
Anybody have any other suggestions for backups and secondary accounts, that aren’t
lemmy.dbzer0.com ,
lemm.ee , or
lemmy.ml
??you’re welcome to make an account at lemdro.id
On my way!! Thank you!!
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.
Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.
I feel this is the fatal flaw of the lemmyverse. Before I heard about lemmy I was building my own similar system where you would subscribe to servers/instances specifically, without any cross instance caching. That way you will only see what you want to see, and if an instance gets overloaded they have to scale up, but won’t bring down your whole browsing in the meantime. It would be up to the client apps to aggregate all your instances/feeds to show you a list to doomscroll through, but you would have one account (activity pub compatible) to subscribe to them all with. If there were private, invite only communities for piracy then it wouldn’t legally jeopardize the rest of them either. I keep chipping away at it. One day I’ll publish is.
Eh. I’m a lawyer. I wouldn’t be afraid of the civil risk unless I was accepting donations. Suing regular people isn’t really a profitable endeavor. I’m more concerned about paying for the hosting and being subscribed to enough of the fediverse to have a representative instance.
Yeah, but Rudd probably doesn’t have the expertise or resources to swat away people that knock on his door with threats of litigation.
And there are a lot of dumb ass lawyers out there that have no problem lobbing threats and cease and desist over the wall. I know, I encounter them all the damn time.
This sums it up pretty well imo. From a legal standpoint hosting a site like Lemmy likely isn’t going to be a problem in most countries (I know it isn’t in mine with some caveats) but that won’t stop the average lawyer from pretending otherwise.
I can’t really blame the lemmy.world admins here, rather I blame the laws that still don’t account for this sort of use case in terms an average human can read and be reassured by.
I don’t understand, what data from other instances is cached, exactly?
And usenet has existed since before the Internet itself, has been used for piracy almost as long, and yet I don’t see many concerns there.
If Alice, a user of lemmy server A, subscribes to a piracy community on server B, all content of that piracy community will be pulled to, cached on, and served to Alice through their home instance, server A.
All it takes is a single user subscribing to a community from another federated server to pull that entire community’s data into their home instance. It’s bad when it’s a copyright violation risk. It’s massively scary when it could happen with something like child porn, because now whoever is running the home server is storing and distributing it unknowingly.
I see the decision you made as the ultimate end to this path you and lemmy world tread. At this rate all federations should defederate each other, or just shut down the whole fediverse. We can go back to individual hyper-specific forums on phbb again.
I mean there is obviously a line between what should federated and what should not. But i feel the reasoning here is fundamentally different then the others chosen in the past.
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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
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Understandable reason but there is not one illegally shared file in these communities. What’s next, watching a John Wick movie makes me a murderer now?
And now the account that redirected all of lemmy.world has been banned from lemmy.world for ban evasion.
This whole thing is weird
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.
Are you talking about a different community or instance? !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com does not allow direct links to content yet lemmy.world admins blocked it anyway.
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.
It’s reasons like these that I like to create 2-4 different accounts on different instances for all around the fediverse , so that if one fails I’ve got a backup, but also so I can “pick and choose” which pros and cons of each instance I like.
It’s obviously more to keep track of, but I encourage others to do the same: create like 3 different accounts on different instances, and toggle through them whenever you need something that one offers that another doesn’t.
Kind of a shitty move really
I just created an account on lemm.ee - thanks for the info.
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 love it. We will win in the end, against the corpos, they shall rule in Hell whilst we serve in Heaven
Uhhh I think you misunderstand the original quote
Not really, in seeking to gain power, they create something worthless by destroying what is valuable, but by working together, we create something glorious that none of us are really in charge of.
usually god, the ultimate authoritarian, is in charge of heaven. i’ll pass
Thank you for taking my metaphor too literally just for the edge
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.
So join one of the instances that got defederated.
All these problems comes from centralization.
