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:
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.
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.
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.
yall, this dude tried signing up to my instance a few nights ago. yall wanna see why many communities have registration approvals? see below. warning for nsfw language
Still laughing at the vast amount of people coming from reddit and expecting only chill people to be on lemmy. Like lemmy users are somehow immune to toxicity.
It’s less toxic overall but we (or mostly the moderators) will have to fight them all the time.
At least it will improve the moderation tools which is always a good thing.
Windscribe works for me. You can either use their software which is open source or create personal VPN configs on their site to use it with your distros network manager.
Made the switch from lemmy.world the other day due to this. Not necessarily because of who they defederated/blocked, but because this happens with little/no consultation or communication with the user base. The frequency of it became frustrating; who knows what other community/instance will be blocked on a whim next?
I appreciate that the LW admins do this as a hobby in their free time, but things like this could be approached in a better way, or at the very least with better communication. I found out about this via a post in /c/mildlyinfuriating, which in itself was mildly infuriating lol.
Migrated to this instance, and I can choose via Connect which instances or communities I want to see. Should have done this sooner.
Sign up for a free dev account, get a full free license. There’s really no point in trying to “crack” it, unless you want to try collecting bug bounties.
If you can’t afford a good VPN, you can’t afford to torrent.
If you don’t pay for something, you are the merchandise. And the last thing you want is a VPN that sells you out, when your primary use case is to do something illegal with it.
TBF it doesn’t seem like they were against piracy per se, they just wanted to avoid potential liability. That said, I’ve still moved on to another instance.
This feels like an obvious bullshit cop-out reason to defederate against a specific community that they don’t like for whatever silly reason they can’t reveal to the public.
Never have I seen an actual link to content survive very long on lemmy.ml or dbzer0.com. Just like the good old /r/Piracy we discuss piracy, but we do not directly facilitate it.
Someone please slap the back of their heads repeatedly and aggressively with these facts. This excuse is disingenuous as hell.
If you are a user of lemmy.world; RUN. NOW! Find a new instance. Switch away from them before they reach terminal enshitification velocity.
piracy
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.