The instance owners do not wish to host potentially problematic content.
I will try to locate a more suitable instance.
“We’re gonna be the instance for everybody! Not you. Not you. Not you either. Ew. Not you. Who let all this riff-raff into the room?”
Between that and the constant downtime, this account might be short-lived.
They are literally going through the same pains as any other social media sites that start getting big. Every social media site wants to be “all-inclusive” until you have to start worrying about content moderation and liability. Shit gets intense.
As for the “downtime,” they’ve done posts about it. They are being constantly DDOS’ed by someone (assuming another defederated instance owner). And given your annoyance of it, it sounds like the DDOS is working as intended. The instance admins have done a fantastic job so far and I intend to wait it out.
There’s no excuse for fumbling along like this is new. Better-run sites know what’s coming and stick close to their initial rules.
If your site hosts pornographic drawings and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether that includes Bart Simpson, you are a fucking idiot.
If your site involves politics and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether Nazis are welcome, you are a fucking idiot.
If your site welcomes leftist counterculture and you don’t have a crystal clear line on whether that includes making guns, smoking pot, or copying text, you are a fucking idiot.
The DDOS is something I’ve gladly weathered, in light of the admins taking it as an opportunity to debug the codebase. But what they’ve posted in-between those updates is “yeah btw we banned another thing that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on 2015 reddit.” I’m not sure I want to stick around with that even if service was flawless.
Yeah fuck those instance owners for not taking on legal risk! We don’t pay them and they should pay for our legal fees out of respect for the content we generate (which is copywritten and could get the instance owner in legal trouble)!
Edit: typos. Also, to explain: I just want y’all to consider the folks who keep the instances running and the legal risk they take. Some instances don’t want to take on the risk. It’s not a left/right thing, it’s a risk-assesment thing. Removing content that might get them in legal trouble doesn’t mean that the instance is taking a political, ethical or moral stance on the topic. It’s really weird to think otherwise. My point was that when the instance owners get a dmca takedown notice (doesn’t really matter what country, doesn’t really matter if theh own the rights to that content or not), they are faced with a choice: do nothing and get sued, possibly needing to shut down the free service as a result. Or, they can choose to remove the content.
Conversational forums like lemmy are still places where links to pirated content can exist. I know people just talk about pirated content and that it’s moderated but hear me out: sometimes people get busy and fall behind. They could then end up with a lawsuit.
To avoid this, a reasonable policy might be to just avoid the topic altogether. But that doesn’t make them right or left wing, it just makes them regular site admins without an unlimited amount of money or the desire to go off grid and on the run. Yeah, that’s the worst case scenario, my point simply being “free service run for long time if rules prevent legal threats to the service’s livelyhood” see: napster.
There are rights and there is if what theyre used to do in a situation is reasonable. Here, the point isnt that you dont have the right to complain, its that complaining that they should risk getting in legal trouble isnt reasonable.
Some jurisdictions are relatively more permissive than others, so the legal risk is not uniform. There will be some user flows until the instance landscape has settled.
Which jurisdiction, mine or yours? Or what about the other person who will comment under this?
Is that the 123.52.33.19 jurisdiction or the 95.32.122.99 jurisdiction?
In other words, on the internet, how are you going to reliably change the content to fit the viewer’s jurisdiction?
Just so people know, when you send a request to the internet, you’re not sending a request from your home address, you’re sending it from an IP address. Those IP addresses are not linked to City, State and Country, at least not reliably. MaxMind has a “GeoIP” database of “best guess” countries for IP addresses, but even if lemmy software were to implement geoIP gating like this, you’d have to taylor individual communities to individual jurisdictions and…
NO ONE IS DOING THAT. Nor will they anytime soon, most likely.
On the internet, it’s far easier to just shut the topic down, as was done with piracy. Sure, folks can share pirated content inside the “spiders” community if they wanted to, but that’s at least a little harder for rights holders to find than the “piracy” community. And by rights holders I mean companies that scan the web for keywords and link and send out automated DCMA takedown requests.
Your point may stand in court but we’re on the internet and those instance owners are likely trying to avoid going to court.
Again, instance owners aren’t instance owners because they want to be your political advocates in court, at their own expence, at the threat of the site being shut down.
copywritten
Underlining how worthless your hot take is. You know less than nothing.
You’ve never heard of Copywrite law? Is libgen not a site for distrubiting copywritten content like text books?
Look, I’m on the information wants to be free side of things, but I do know a bit about the law.
Please, oh wise one, break down my stupidity and leave no detail out!
“Are you people aware of what you’re complaining about?”
Come on man, extrapolate.
Just join dbzer0, we already have the piracy community
What if the community shifted to an already-existing one?
Do you mind elaborating? Is there something you could share that provides more context?
I know shrine from another place and used to trust him. However, among other things, he silently dropped privileges on other mod accounts on /r/libgen and /r/scihub. I wanted to point you to a pinned post of mine for the gory details, but that seems to be no longer there. I’m not going to check the mod log who cleaned up but just going to assume it was him.
So, I no longer trust him to be a good steward of a community and will not work with him on any project.
Oh no
Anyway