Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.

This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

  • Squizzy@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Surely there is a discussion to be had around what is and isn’t allowed, there are plenty of subreddits discussing piracy without dolirect links that are playing within the rules.

    • lwadmin@lemmy.worldOPM
      0·
      1 year ago

      Sure. But we’re a group of volunteers and we would not like to find out the hard way what is possible and what not. We would think meta discussions about piracy should be allowed as long as there is no linking to actual illegal content.
      But is pointing to locations with illegal content legal or not? And having members/admins worldwide it makes it even harder to be sure.

      We don’t want to find out the hard way and this is a better safe than sorry measure. Again we personally have nothing against the people on these communities or against the communities itself.