Honestly, I don’t blame them one bit. People need to keep in mind that these instances and sites are provided for free by private individuals and not large companies with armies of lawyers. I wouldn’t want to fight a potential lawsuit for “enabling piracy”, no matter how much bullshit it is. If the admins of dbzer0 have taken the necessary precautions, great! Just join their instance if that’s what you’re looking for.
Pretty sure all the piracy communities I’ve seen have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content. Mainly its piracy discussions.
Here is a whole ass post from the admin of this instance about not directly linking: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18438
This post is linked under the main rules of this community, Rule 3. Don’t request of link to specific pirated titles.
Meaning this is a joke of a line of reasoning, you’re not “protecting” anyone by limiting discussion.
Yeah but the piracy subreddit also had those rules and various companies still sent notices to reddit. Sure they were bullshit, but copyright law puts the burden of proof on the alleged infringers not the copyright holders.
Someone here claimed they were in the Netherlands, turns out that’s not true they’re hosted in Finland.
I didn’t know the USA’s DMCA applied to the country of Finland. Reddit still got them because they’re a fucking US company based in the fucking US.
This shit is like people not understanding that The Pirate Bay didn’t have to follow US laws back in the day. Infuriatingly fucking dumb.
Lemmy.world is hosted in the Netherlands, which are notorious for going after people just for “promoting” piracy. They don’t care if you’re actually breaking the law, they will just make your life hard. And that’s not something I’d want to deal with in addition to hosting a free service.
Yeah, these are not company run sites with monetization plans. People saying they’ll show them by leaving is funny, since these instances cost money as opposed to making money so I don’t think they’ll be sad about less overhead. People here aren’t paying customers but guests being invited to use another person’s instance over self hosting their own.
If people want uninterrupted access to this instance they can sign up to this instance, self host, or look for instances located in a country with less strict laws that might lower chances of defederation from here?
Excatly why I never opened my instance. With it just being me, i can control what is on it and what is synced. There was too much risk with CP/CSAM type stuff. Heck I didnt even want to risk my linode account (aka they shut my other VPS systems down) due to TOS from shenanigans.
That said, I can still contribute just fine with my own instance and dont have to be involved in these drama defederation actions.
I would encourage anyone that is willing to criticize an instance maintainer for their decisions on risk to just roll out the lemmy-ansible setup and go your own way. If you troll or act in bad faith, you will get defederated. If you act like a reasonable person, no one will even notice. And that way you are in control of uptime, patch cadence, backups etc.
Does self-hosting still have the problem of not being able to find communities since nobody on your instance had followed them?
I was looking at self hosting for my normal browsing stuff, with all the porn and questionable stuff defederated or blocked (and keep this one exactly where it is on dbzer0) but I mostly just browse all, and I’ve heard that’s the same feed as subscribed on tiny instances.
Any insight on that?
A few questions as you’re self hosting an instance and I haven’t read much about it yet.
Are you hosting it on personal hardware?
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?
Yep. People were mad at Blahaj zone admins at defederating from the porn instances but holy shit the liability when it comes to these things is insane. People don’t seem to understand that an instance hosts a cache of all the federated instances that users visit. If something is hosted on one of the piracy instances that some corp doesn’t like, they come for everyone who has that data.
To everyone ready with their pitchforks, here is a scenario: lemmy.world may receive a court order (subpoena?) mandating they disclose data on people actively accessing pirate communities. As it happened with Reddit, they may ask for logs and IP addresses of people commenting, posting or perhaps even up/down voting content.
Even though none of the content is being posted/hosted with this instance, admins may be asked to betray user trust - or to go battle claimants in court. It’s a lose-lose for them, so maybe let’s cut them some slack, eh?
I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:
- Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
- The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.
It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.
That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:
- I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
- Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
- Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
- Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.
Yeah, I’m not sure why some people assume it’s a problem. I’ve had a few accounts now. I went kbin to Beehaw (liked Lemmy more overall) to LemmyWorld to Lemmee (initially as an alt). Now Lemmee is the main. And if that goes sideways, well, I’ve got at least 3 other instances I’ve got my eye on as potentials. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
It honestly makes a lot of sense to keep illegal content that’s the source of frequent legal actions away from the largest general purpose communities. As you correctly point out it is extremely easy to join another instance where these discussions are allowed, and the larger instances have every reason to have a “better safe than sorry” approach to content moderation.
It seems to me the Threadiverse is too negative of the concept of defederation. It’s a key concept of how the Fediverse works, and is supposed to work. The people on Lemmygrad is looking for a completely different experience from the folks over at Beehaw, so let them have it. Lemmy.world has become the largest instance, so naturally they need to have an approach to content moderation that is unlikely to land them in legal trouble. And even if they didn’t, they’d be welcome to block discussions of piracy out of moral conviction or any other reason, just as their users are welcome to sign up somewhere else if they are looking for a different experience.
There was drama about defederation on Mastodon in the beginning as well, but I guess people coming from Twitter had an easier time intuitively understanding the appeal of it.
The problem with your reasoning is that these communities aren’t providing/hosting any illegal content. Furthermore, “legal” where? US law doesn’t apply outside of the US and vice versa.
My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don’t.
The fediverse doesn’t need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn’t be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter “e” is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).
Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it’s fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It’s simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.
If you don’t like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It’s literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.
Absurd. None of these communities are even hosted on lemmy.world.
lemmy.world has more downtime than France’s administration anyway,. so at least we can still sail the high seas while they’re down.
Absurd. None of these communities are even hosted on lemmy.world.
This is the answer, period. They aren’t hosting infringing content, they’re barely even linking to discussion of it. Most of the piracy communities here on Lemmy all have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content.
It’s a fucking joke by people who think they’re doing something to protect their users but are actually just fucking around wasting time and energy.
piracy communities here on Lemmy all have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content.
I left Reddit because of bans, shadowbans, and powermods. A few weeks on Lemmy and we now have bans from powermods. This sucks.
Difference 2 is it’s not really powermodding. At least not from the way I personally understand powermodding. Imo powermodding is when a mod decides to get rid of content they personally just don’t like.
In this case they got rid of a big risk to the instance itself, because, if someone decided to upload pirated content on here it would get federated to all instances that haven’t blocked the one initially distributing such content. Like another user said on this topic, this could be compared to torrenting, only without the direct P2P distribution. The risk of course falls on the people hosting the instances.
Since they host these instances pretty much for free aside of donations, that are not a requirement, and the fact that, like nanometer said, you can just choose not to be part of the instance (and register to another instance), I wouldn’t put blame on the admins of lemmy.world in this case.
Is that really the case though? They are saying they didn’t want to risk legal troubles which sounds reasonable to me considering they’re just your average people with a hobby.
They’re not risking legal troubles unless they receive and don’t comply with a DMCA takedown request. Like I said elsewhere, this is about making their site friendly to advertisers.
Dealing with DMCA takedown requests is a hassle, even if you never get charged with anything. I can understand them deciding not to bother with that. As long as they realize that in the process they’re not bothering with a certain portion of the userbase, who will move elsewhere to see the content they want to see. That’s easy on the Fediverse.
Not every instance is good for every user or community. The Piracy communities have long been some of the biggest communities on here, however it’s absolutely within the rights of the world admins to decide they don’t want to support them? If you object, you don’t need to throw a fuss about it. Just move yourself or your communities to an instance that’s online with your viewpoints.
If you object to people expressing their displeasure, you don’t need to throw a fuss about it.
The crazy part about it is, that even if every instance blocked everyone, you could always host your own instance and I think if you host one just for yourself and maybe a few friends or something it probably wouldn’t even cost a cent.
To be blunt, lemmy.world has always seemed to emulate reddit too much for my comfort, even in vetting registrations. 9/10 of the bad enlightened centrist takes I’ve seen here have come from lemmy.world users who are clearly reddit transplants.
Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance, it makes sense that they attract everyone even those type of people. They don’t understand the concept of distribution, of course they’re gonna go where the number is largest. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s the admins fault for the people that went there.
“Though a 1/4 of a Burger may be bigger in their eyes than a 1/3 of that same Burger, the ingredients stay the same.” - Winston Churchill
