As we’ve all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
!steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
!piracy@lemmy.ml, 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!
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.
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.
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. !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is not one of those communities. Thanks and have a good day.
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.
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?
That’s just shitty moderation and probably a overworked mod team, not sure what drug you got your hands on but I would kind of like to try it if you have any left!
We’ll see you battling takedown requests and not being paud to do so.
All at the risk of a lawyer comibg for your ass and closing the whole server down.
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?
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.
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.
There is a difference betwen cencorship and moderation and one of them is a must sve or you end up with 4chan 2.0 but in this case the decition was bad the the reasoning even worse!
I disagree. Lemmy mods that grew in size got trigger happy with the block button, just like reddit mods did/do. And uses the same tired excuses to justify their behavior.
Lemmy mods have a horrible and unthankful job, they get flooded with CSAM we never have to see and I didn’t experience any issues with mods so far, is it possible that the issue is related to the kind of stuff you post?
You seem to confuse mods and admins, the only thing mods do is run and and moderate specific communities to keep a nice environment people want to participate in. Admins on the other hand manage the instance and are vastly different for most instances (there are some with significant overlap like Lemmy.ml and Lemmingrad but that’s usually not the case) and they are behind something like defederations. I didn’t see many unjustified defederation and block attempts so far tho, Lemmy.world fucked up with the piracy communities and I did view their proactive defederation from Hexbear critical but now that I know what Hexbear really spreads around the Fediverse I actually switched instance just to get rid of them so I guess they where right on that one!
No acknowledgement or sorry for their stupid garbage and if you try to mention it in their “community” you won’t have a good time, definitely not going to follow anything on that instance except the shitposts again but good to see that they correct a mistake at all I guess!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Still don’t trust them, they recently censored the fosscad community without announcement or warning.
Great news, that’s a whole lot of people having access to this community again!
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 :)
I created this user in this instance because I knew this would eventually happen.
I’m happy with my choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have been advised by my lawyer not to give any public statements regarding this specific issue at this time!
brace noise
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. !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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?
Damn, I want your drugs!
Trust me you don’t want them!
What tf was woke about that or even better question what tf dose woke even mean by now?..
Trigger happy on banning communities/speech under the guise of moderation using a loosely interpreted TOS policy counts as woke to me.
That’s just shitty moderation and probably a overworked mod team, not sure what drug you got your hands on but I would kind of like to try it if you have any left!
“We love you… unless it’s not in our best interest to do so.”
You’re acting like lemmy.world is ran by a corporation with plenty of power to fight back.
It’s a FOSS not-for-profit social media platform. I don’t also expect unconditional love. LMAO
We’ll see you battling takedown requests and not being paud to do so.
All at the risk of a lawyer comibg for your ass and closing the whole server down.
They can’t touch my server its hosted on the moon
deleted by creator
Don’t you have a subreddit to try to be funny in?
That’s kind of how it should work everywhere though. Cher figured that out about Sonny eventually for instance.
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.
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!
I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
There are international agreements about copyright law designed specifically that prevent the loophole you’re thinking of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty#:~:text=and knowledge industry.-,Implementation,behalf of the European Community.
Sounds like hosting in Germany was a retarded idea then
They do, unfortunately
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.
The companies don’t care if they have legal grounds. The threat of legal fees are enough to make most places comply
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.
Reckon they were also losing users cause of this decision.
Ye basically me, left right away to lemme.ee
Same here, now I only use .world only for .world communities, .ee for everything else.
Definitely. I migrated my account after they took an anti-piracy stance.
yeah I sure love lots of booty
Dude, I’m at work. Put a NSFW on that thing.
Glad to be back! I miss hearing about piracy news
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
Finally.
Sounds like excuses to me and avoidance in tackling the real issues at hand (censorship of content).
There is a difference betwen cencorship and moderation and one of them is a must sve or you end up with 4chan 2.0 but in this case the decition was bad the the reasoning even worse!
I disagree. Lemmy mods that grew in size got trigger happy with the block button, just like reddit mods did/do. And uses the same tired excuses to justify their behavior.
Lemmy mods have a horrible and unthankful job, they get flooded with CSAM we never have to see and I didn’t experience any issues with mods so far, is it possible that the issue is related to the kind of stuff you post?
What does mods getting CSAM posts have to do with banning a piracy community?
And I do not see the relevance in your second question.
You seem to confuse mods and admins, the only thing mods do is run and and moderate specific communities to keep a nice environment people want to participate in. Admins on the other hand manage the instance and are vastly different for most instances (there are some with significant overlap like Lemmy.ml and Lemmingrad but that’s usually not the case) and they are behind something like defederations. I didn’t see many unjustified defederation and block attempts so far tho, Lemmy.world fucked up with the piracy communities and I did view their proactive defederation from Hexbear critical but now that I know what Hexbear really spreads around the Fediverse I actually switched instance just to get rid of them so I guess they where right on that one!
Thanks for the correction. Meant to mention instance admins.
Because you’d never know about them if you are not looking for the banned communities.
You can block a community from your user panel. Which is why the community bans/deferations from admins is ridiculous.
Fuck Lemmy.world
No acknowledgement or sorry for their stupid garbage and if you try to mention it in their “community” you won’t have a good time, definitely not going to follow anything on that instance except the shitposts again but good to see that they correct a mistake at all I guess!