- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like Lemmy has a tragic flaw. Not decentralized enough.
A lot of people are saying “just connect to another instance”, but it would be nice if the client could connect to multiple instances at once, and merge things internally, maybe even spreading the load a bit.
Probably a bit tricky for the web and linking, but maybe something for the mobile apps to consider?
Ideally the only time I’d need to swap accounts is to post.
How would you deal with votes? That’s a pretty common action, and having to choose every time would be tedious
You could list your accounts in priority, and the highest account that has access to the post you’re reading will be responsible for the vote.
Considering how well voting has turned out in general, maybe the voting system is the issue.
You know, I don’t even disagree with you. Voting really doesn’t bring any good to the table, it only creates some sort of hive mind mentality
Plus it allows users to anonymously express disdain towards somebody, not just to their comment or opinion but them personally I’ve seen this happen on Reddit where people were mass downvoted for seemingly no reason other than being openly trans/queer.
It only gets worse when you use that as a reputation system for restricting users because then it’s a social credit system.
Agree. I moved to an instance without downvotes for this reason.
and warframe!
Just choose default in the app
Gross. Useful idiots are the worst.
I’ll be looking for a new instance, pronto!
Come on over to Lemmy.dbzer0.com I moved over the last time from .world to dbzer0.com.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got the state correct 👍
Oof, yeah that’s bad…
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.
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.
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?
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
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 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 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.
Yeah, we should run this shit through Somalia, they don’t give a f u c k.
Lemmy.world is a fucking shithole. It’s teenage life crisis tumblr in here.
Luckily, you can always move elsewhere :)
Stop crying about it and just join a new instance, pretty simple.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
cum
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:
“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
Sad that antipiracy laws are in place.
But understandable that lemmy.world protect themselves against those unfair laws.
The sailing will continue, but, as always, we should be wary of the “navy” and sail with precaution.
I never sail without protection
They should defederate from Lemmy.ml for having admins complicit in violating Strafgesetzbuch section 86a instead of this crap.
Strafgesetzbuch section 86a
Yes, they should defederate for another instance because they allow symbols banned by an authoritarian state, rather than worry about attracting the attention of United States federal authorities. Congrats, you win the person the year award… that I’d vote to lobotomize.
Should read the ToS of LW (your instance):
The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:
- The Netherlands
- Republic of Finland
- Federal Republic of Germany
You should prob look into the history of The Pirate Bay’s legal issues in the countries you mentioned
What a bunch of fucking clowns.
Anyways… !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
That returns an error.
Is there another instance you’d recommend?
I can see it just fine. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Making a new account isn’t difficult; I chose my instance specifically because I wanted access to that particular community.
Which instance do you recommend?
I mean, dbzer0 is the one I actively use, so that one. It’s an anarchist instance, it’s the one that hosts the community, and I happen to align with the prevelant way of thinking, which made the decision fairly easy.
Try this link: lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
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
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