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:
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?
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.
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.
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.