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.
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
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).
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.
I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?
No. .world is just afraid of everything. Better they shut down their instance.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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!!!
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn’t stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
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
It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
Honestly, I just found this place first, and I don’t remember what I came here for. I didn’t make an account, then I did recently and now get approved. Lets goo. Options are great the advantage of the Fediverse is that you can always create a new server instance every time. Probably always changing your IP every time the server gets taken down and have none of the names associated with it are the same.
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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?
Dammit… moved to lemmy.world cos they seem friendly and now this shit…
Anyone knows of an instance which didn’t block anything? I don’t want to self-host.
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!
Wtf dbzero was a huge proponent of the fediverse and has been a part of the recent swell in users. I don’t agree with this decision at all
Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
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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”
Beauty of fediverse, people can just find another spot or move to another instance while most of the community continues no problem.
Just an example that system working as intended
but only if you know enough about the fediverse to be aware; if i had no logged into like i usually don’t do on these days, i would never know and spend the rest of my time on lemmy.world trying to figure out why i can’t find any pirating stuff to share.
Rule 1 is too vague.
No illegal content, including sharing copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the owner(s).
They can defederate with any instance with this rule. Why not just say “because we want to”?
Unless those communities were sharing links to pirated content. If it was just talk about piracy and piracy news then I don’t think that’s a good reason to defederate.
No illegal content
Illegal in which country? Copyright infringement isn’t illegal in my country for example, except for severe cases where you’re profiting off of it. If we have to cater to all countries’ laws we might as well ban music as well since it’s illegal in Afghanistan.
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This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
It was inevitable and it’s not their fault. Because of how the Fediverse works it means they’re storing all content from those communities on their servers too. This means they’re storing piracy content and can be subject to a takedown.
We knew larger instances would defederate from piracy communities at some point, don’t take it out on the admins.
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