Hello World!
As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!
We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.
With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!
Lemmy.world Team
❤️
From a legal standpoint, I sort of get it. One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content. However, if the server is actively moderated and owners respond responsibly to take down requests, they should be okay - in the US at least, and assuming current protections for service providers remain intact.
I think a good option (if technically feasible) could be to have the choice to de-cache communities or servers that are questionable and make it so that data is transmitted live from the federated server when requested by a client. That would add load to both the local and federated servers though, especially if volume is high.
This 100%. And not just piracy-related stuff.
Tbh, there have been some decisions by lemmy.world admins that i didn't really support, but this one is understandable imo.
I wonder if the lemmy devs are aware of this and what steps can be taken to protect the instance owners from stuff in other instances that can get them in trouble.