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Removal of piracy communities - Lemmy.world
alexandrite.appEarlier, 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: - !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
[/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com] - !piracy@lemmy.ml [/c/piracy@lemmy.ml] -
!steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com [/c/steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com] 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.
A copy of that discussion is hosted on lemmy.world. In fact, all content from other instances on lemmy.world is in fact just a copy hosted on lemmy.world. That is how federation works. If a post that breaks the laws lemmy.world is subjected to, is federated to lemmy.world, lemmy.world will automatically create a copy of that post and make it available to all its visitors. By law, lemmy.world is hosting illegal content. This is a fubxamental design flaw with Lemmy and Mastoson, or the ActivityPub peotocol, that needs to be adressed by the developers, if instance admins are to be sure that they are not breaking laws by federating.