cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6018317
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:
- [email protected],
- [email protected],
- [email protected], and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
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
❤️
That’s nice of them to walk it back. Definitely not something you’d see Reddit do
Yeah, it was a nice surprise for sure. I’m glad to have the lemmy.world crowd back, plenty of booty for all.
Glad to be back! I miss hearing about piracy news
Reckon they were also losing users cause of this decision.
Definitely. I migrated my account after they took an anti-piracy stance.
Ye basically me, left right away to lemme.ee
yeah I sure love lots of booty
Dude, I’m at work. Put a NSFW on that thing.
What’s reddit?
A lemmy clone.
A weird one. You create content and its shareholders buy new yachts.
Exploitative and at the same time very user unfriendly. Weird one indeed.
The new Digg
I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.
DMCA takedown requests are kinda “guilty until proven innocent” instead of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Not sure if DMCA requests matter to a server hosted in Germany, though.
Also, as they mentioned, their admins were overworked as is and probably just needed time to go through the requests to see that they’re all bullshit.
They do, unfortunately
There are international agreements about copyright law designed specifically that prevent the loophole you’re thinking of.
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Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
Only if they are legal requests, which in the case of a request to ban discussion, isn’t.
(And that is why one usually has a legal canary and a policy to publish any and all DMCA requests received, as I’ve seen some orgs do. Helps put the trolls on the spotlight and quickly detect unlawful usage)
The team could have perfectly asnwered by not doing anything at all, waiting a day or two to file a counternotice. Unfortunately the system is stacked in favour of the big pharmas of media, but it’s not like there is nothing that can be done.
It’s not that simple. A lot of the times these DMCAs are not sent to your instance email, they’re sent to your provider’s and they don’t give a fuck. They will tell you, “remove it, or we take down your whole server and all data in it”. You can send a DMCA counternotice sometimes, but eventually if you get enough bogus DMCAs, some providers just terminate your service anyway due to their hassle. It’s fucked up and the reason why lemmy.dbzer0.com had to change providers to someone more hostile to bogus-DMCAs.
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There weren’t any, it was just a troll account that asked admins at a bunch of different Lemmy instances to block anything related to piracy. Lemmy.world admins took the bait. Even in the original announcement they never mentioned anything about dealing with tons of takedown requests. In other words they were blocking piracy related content preemptively before any takedowns occurred.
It’s nice they walked back that decision but I’m still not going to create an account there.
Lemmy.world has a bad habit of acting preemptively first and asking questions later.
Thanks for your insight, you obviously know what you are talking about. Can I have your sources on this please?
The companies don’t care if they have legal grounds. The threat of legal fees are enough to make most places comply
Dbzer0 is one of the few I have seen making Lemmy better and better.
It’s honestly the perfect use case for Lemmy too. It’s the kind of thing where decentralization is hugely helpful.
Aww shucks :)
The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn’t just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.
In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.
Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we’re definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.
Hi Antik, as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I was very happy to hear that you decided ‘unremove’ our little community. I appreciate you going to the effort of revisiting the earlier decision and being transparent about the process, and I’m sure that goes for the vast majority of the people here (though obviously not all 🤨).
While individual users were probably more impacted by that decision than we were as a instance (because they couldn’t access this community from lemmy.world), I can tell you that our admin team fully understood the situation you were in and there are no hard feelings from our side.
I don’t know whether there is a wider appreciation of the fact that managing a lemmy instance is quite labor intensive and technically challenging for the system admins, who are all volunteering their time and expertise. And there’s still lots of bugs and problems to identify and deal with.
Hey Unruffled. I know you had your opinion back when we made that unpopular move too ;) But whatever the users here might think, the contact between most instance admins over on the matrix channels is pretty good and helpful. We might not all allign all the time but there is always respect and understanding. And I think you can confirm that everyone just tries to help each other there no matter what the differences.
I contacted db0 soon after we blocked those communities and have always been in good contact with him since. He understood our situation very well. And as you know yourself Lemmy World has been very active and very publicly pushing the fediseer project. Again, we have our differences but we all want Lemmy to succeed.
Appreciate you dude!
You’re saying you can tell us that your team understood the situation fully? I know db0 was understanding. I also know yourself was trashing us for completely uninformed reasons and riding the hate wave when it happened. Time to leave that in the past, I guess. I appreciate choosing the peaceful way.
Thank you for your free and much-needed/appreciated work!
Can you post the DMCA notice you received? It should include what the copyright material was which would be interesting given it was discussion only.
So they finally realized the person that convinced them to block the piracy subs was an idiot transphobic troll who was unhealthily obsessed with defending bungie, a faceless game corporation that needs no defense?
Shocker.
Don’t try to tell them in their “community”, lemmy.world users are as nasty as always!
Still don’t trust them, they recently censored the fosscad community without announcement or warning.
For those that don’t know what “fosscad” is, it was a community where they were sharing 3D printing schematics for guns and other weapons. Which is an entirely different legal nightmare with different laws in different countries.
We’re back, baby!
Finally.
Fuck Lemmy.world
Great news, that’s a whole lot of people having access to this community again!
I created this user in this instance because I knew this would eventually happen.
I’m happy with my choice.
it’s time to welcome these communities back again
That they’d be welcomed back?
Not my brightness moment.
I used to have an account on that woke instance. Left the dumpster fire for lemmy.ml. Not going to entertain obvious censorship on Lemmy.
This doesn’t sound like censorship, it sounds like they were getting legal threats directly levied at their volunteer team. I can understand the desire to protect yourself against getting sued for your (admittedly large) side project. It sounds like they are working on it in good faith though.
it sounds like they were getting legal threats directly levied at their volunteer team
In the spirit of transparency to the community, post pictures of the legal letters received. Or am just going to assume you are carrying out moderation ahem censorship on the instance.
sounds like they are working on it in good faith though.
Sure. All censorship starts out in good faith.
Firstly, let me be clear. This is my opinion as someone who isn’t, and has never been involved with their instance in any capacity. My account is with pawb.social.
Posting legal letters may open them up to additional legal liability, and it is completely reasonable to let the community know what happened without sharing the actual letter.
Secondly, you’re putting words in my mouth. I am not saying they are censoring in good faith. I am saying the complete opposite, that they are reversing their stance in good faith. In other words, they are uncensoring content in good faith.
Posting legal letters may open them up to additional legal liability
So it’s a case of their word against ours… Anyway, IANAL but I’ve seen other similarly positioned projects in the open-source software world post evidence of similar letters.
they are uncensoring content in good faith
You do understand that this means that at worst the legal threat did not exist in the first place. At best, the threat no longer exists. Either way, the damage is already done. I don’t see the point of walking back. You just don’t get to “uncensor” things after the fact.
if you think a cesspit like .world is “woke” what the hell are you?
Just a free-minded individual with strong views about freedom of speech & censorship.
A libertarian then? What are your views on the age of consent?
You are entitled to your views, but please don’t turn this post into a political discussion. If you want to talk about your political opinions, there are plenty of communities for that topic. [email protected] is not one of those communities. Thanks and have a good day.
How ironic. You are the one who posted the topic doofus!
Yes, so people in our community are aware of the ‘unremoval’, not to hate on lemmy.world. It’s a move in the right direction and personally I’m glad they took this step. Everyone is so tribal nowadays, just chill.
I’ll be chill when you stop making corny comments!
No anti-“woke” voices are even remotely approaching getting “censored” or “silenced”. If they are then why do I have to hear about them every fucking day?
On the contrary, if you want to hear from a good portion of the population about issues that affect them you need some aggressively anti-racist anti-sexist anti-queerphobic etc spaces or you won’t likely get the chance. Isn’t hearing what real marginalized people have to say about their own experiences a million times more important than some vague worry about crypto-fash#56637 getting to say their piece which has already been heard and generally decided to be socially harmful and, importantly, silencing to the people their racist, ___-phobic etc speech implies violence to? A chilling effect as you
enthusiasts call it.Isn’t freedom of speech more about an individual having the right to hear from many viewpoints, than it is about an individual having the right to say anything and everything, anywhere, any time, they so desire?
You left a “woke” instance for one run by communists?
When did commies become woke?
“We love you… unless it’s not in our best interest to do so.”
It’s a FOSS not-for-profit social media platform. I don’t also expect unconditional love. LMAO
Lemmy instances are run by VOLUNTEERS! Lemmy.world is not a COMPANY. A company can have an army of lawyers. An instance run by VOLUNTEERS cannot.
If anyone wants to apply as our fall guy hmu
You’re acting like lemmy.world is ran by a corporation with plenty of power to fight back.
We’ll see you battling takedown requests and not being paid to do so.
All at the risk of a lawyer coming for your ass and closing the whole server down.They can’t touch my server its hosted on the moon
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That’s kind of how it should work everywhere though. Cher figured that out about Sonny eventually for instance.
Don’t you have a subreddit to try to be funny in?
And we Love every single downvote you got from these fine people, too ❤️
