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.
This is a bit concerning… why is Lemmy censoring things that not even Reddit is censoring? This seems like a bleak warning for the future of the platform. I understand censoring illegal content, but if nothing is hosted on Lemmy, then what’s the problem?
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It’s not “lemmy”. It’s lemmy.world and I feel like there should be a clear distinction here friend.
First by remaining federated, due to how federation works, lemmy.world actually downloads content from the instance hosting the piracy community. meanwhile reddit only allows links, not actual content, uploaded to their site.
Second this is just a small group of people not a tech company. Reddit can hire a team of lawyers to defend them and developers to develop tools to remove pirated content. I doubt lemmy.world has resources like that