This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users.
A week ago Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. This wasn’t very well received (about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements). The comments on that post were turned off, presumably to avoid backlash.
Before that, announcements about the instance used to be posted to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world. This time, the information was posted on the Discord server instead.
I don’t agree with this. Having to use a proprietary platform to participate in an open-source one goes against the very purpose for me, especially when the new solution isn’t really an improvement (as before the information about the platform was closer to it).
Edit: Corrected the announcements community name.
Update: Lemmy.world finally released an announcement and promised they would inform about similar actions and gather feedback in advance in future.
This whole situation is rubbing me the wrong way. I can understand the motives behind defederating even if I don’t agree but it’s been a day and the only announcement is still on Discord. Not ideal.
It would definitely make more sense to post the announcements on Lemmy rather than another discord server.
IMHO, Rather than dividing the stream of new information it would be better to focus on one platform.
Personally I dislike discord as the conversations there are too fast for me.
Matrix is a federated alternative to Discord that is both open source and highly concerned with user privacy. It’s also very popular here on Lemmy, and a lot of communities here use it. 
Ruud decided matrix was too hard unreliable to use for this purpose and bailed a few weeks ago
ETA: wrong adjective
I have not heard of matrix till now. How does one join?
God I feel like an old person always asking the younguns how to fediverse…
get started here by choosing a matrix client: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
I can tell you Governments are already investigating several federated servers including lemmy instances. I doubt LW wanted to deal with the European Union cracking down on copyright infringement. Users are going to see a lot of instances shut down or blocked in the near future due to legal violations.
Are they really? Do you have any sources for that? That’s a very lofty claim. I know some mastodon instances are likely to be, but Lemmy? with how new it is feels kind of far fetched
Govt investigations rarely publish their finding until the parties in question are charged.
Sure, for a server as large and accessible as LW, Discord is a super useful, accessible platform. However, the Discord server should not be the only place that such an update is posted.
Realistically, you can’t expect much of the LW userbase to see and engage with an announcement in a Discord server, compared to a post on lemmyworld@lemmy.world.
I agree 100%. If they are going to make an announcement about lemmy.world, they need to do it on lemmy.world. We’re not all on the Discord. I, for one, don’t want to be.
They absolutely should make announcements here, but I think it’s a matter of people attacking them all of the time. We have to give them a lot of credit for handling so many ddos attacks, someone really doesn’t want this place to exist. Imo, let’s give them a chance to talk about it and not make this a bigger deal than it is. This is a volunteer site and instance, not a billion dollar company so go easy.
Its so weird how aggressive people are against lemmy. People don’t want this entire platform to exist, not just lemmy.world. Like lemmynsfw has had people try to suspend pretty much all their payment processors and hosts repeatedly
I 100% agree. My conspiracy theory is that it isn’t reddit or the dude who was upset they banned him, but the people who paid reddit to handle narratives. Lemmy is breaking the PR system. Politics, technology, and also other big communities are taking off and that’s a no go. I could be wrong though, it could be one of the first two or a combo of all three.
Or secondarily I’d say Mastodon. They have an account but never post anything there.
One of the original intentions of posting somewhere else was about outages.
Something like “we are down so much come read about it live over at …”
A single community was blocked due to a legal issue. It can be unblocked once the legal ramifications are resolved.
Legal ramifications in what way? And do we know that there was a dialog about this with the community mods? The one I looked at has rules against directly linking to infringing content, so it seem-- at least from where I’m sitting-- that blocking would not be an appropriate first step, instead opening a dialog with the mods/admins to moderate any offending content.
And, in case it needs saying-- US copyright law is not global copyright law, and discussing copyright infringement is not illegal.
Though, more to the point, this kind of poor communication-- if not the actions themselves-- makes me wonder if I should move to a new instance. I don’t want to, but I also don’t want admins making decisions without communicating them to the userbase, whether I personally agree with the decision or not. It certainly doesn’t give the impression of transparency.
The image cache on the LW server is a likely reason for the legal issues.
I truly don’t mean to be dense, but I don’t follow. We’re talking about piracy, right? What images are of concern there, and why does the first step to resolving it have to be blocking instead of communication?
There wasn’t any specific legal issue from what I know. This was triggered by a butthurt transphobic troll who got banned in lemmy.dbzer0.com and then opened the call to defed. Then lemmy.world preemptively blocked the pirate communities, just in case
