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.
lemmy.world doesn’t owe you anything, they don’t benefit from additional users, and they’re definitely not obligated to put themselves in legal jeopardy to keep you around.
The poster didn’t mention anything about LW owing us anything or if they’re obligated to users in any way.
I appreciate LW, and i understand their stance on piracy. But I’m also interested in how we regular users can easily find servers that are more flexible with their policies.
This whole conversation is getting me legitimately frustrated. The unmitigated gall to say that creating an account somewhere else is “a real chore” when speaking to a group of people who are running this place for free and making it available to him, for free, is staggering. Maybe it’s just a lack of understanding or caring how much work it takes. I’ve done stuff like this before, it’s not simple. Probably if Antik were doing what he does for lemmy.world at a job, he’d be making six figures at that job. It’s fine and nothing wrong with them choosing to contribute that, but going to their server and then shitting all over them for not doing it the way you want them to, in a scenario like this where all they’re trying to do is protect themselves legally, is an incredibly entitled, childish, rude, selfish, and ultimately destructive thing to do.
It’s very different from reddit running their business, screwing the users because it’s not about the users, and people getting upset with them. There are no investors here, there is no IPO or marketing budget. It’s just some people deciding to host a service they think is important, and you’re coming on here whining about how they need to do what you say, even if it puts them in legal danger, and if they don’t you’ll go somewhere else. Okay, sounds good. Go.
You are correct that Railcar8095 didn’t explicitly say that lemmy.world owed him the hosting of this pirated content. He just made vague passive-aggressive statements which implied it, with threats to no longer bless the admins by consuming resources they were choosing to make freely available to him, if his requirements weren’t met.
Staggering.
I agree with you, but I guess we now have the proofs that the assumed “nicer community” on Lemmy is not that completely nice overall.
You made a lot of good points, I guess people just don’t understand (or want to) what it takes to manage such a server.
I think that’s a lot of it. The internet being made of free services for so long has created this sort of “I sit on my ass and the internet is supposed to all come to me and if I don’t like something I’m going to demand to speak to the manager” mentality. That’s fine for some things, but on a community-run server where people have no clue the level of work and the generosity being put in by the people they’re talking to, it genuinely pisses me off.
I actually don’t really care about Lemmy people being nice; I was a big fan as of two months ago because it was full of weirdos and tankies and creative people being genuine about their weird cantankerous ways. Now it seems like the people whose heads are just filled with wet newspaper are here in force, and it makes me sad.
Appreciate your response.
And i don’t mean to be daft. But I don’t know where to start to find somewhere if any that suits me better than LW.
And that is a problem with something as decentralised as Lemmy is, to be a reddit competitor The layman has too many options and won’t seek a server that might suit them better. LW was a good starting point for me, I will probably look around for a server that isn’t as risk averse, but not everyone would.
If this isn’t a Redditor moment I don’t know what is
Haha yeah, maybe so. All I’m trying to say is, if there’s a community of people so childish that they’re going to oppose this announcement with this much vigor, then I’d rather they be opposing me, too.
Says the child.
Why are you being so hostile?
I’m not being hostile, I’m being direct. Read it again. If I said what I really felt about talking that way to the people who are bending over backwards to keep this service operating for him, for free, then it would be hostile, but I didn’t do that.
Lemmy is not a free service, it is a donation-based service, which is a business model which does benefit from having as many users as possible. The more users you have, the more donors you will have among their ranks. Your conception of social media makes sense for reddit and twitter and similar zero-interest-rate-phenomena websites that get by on idiot VC money, but this business model absolutely depends on satisfying the largest possible percentage of users such that the largest possible fraction will convert to donating.
Are you seriously telling me that the people all aggrieved and upset that lemmy.world won’t serve them pirated content, are donating?
I’m subscribed to the Patreon, and threads like this make me think about leaving this instance. I think it’s likely that the intersection of the donators and the people who get driven away by this stuff, is much larger than the intersection of the donators and the whiners-about-losing-piracy-subs.
These communities do not host pirated content, and they weren’t removed on the presumption that they do. They are communities that pirates used to discuss piracy. And yes, as you probably aren’t aware most websites that actually do host pirated content (or torrents to pirated content, let’s not split hairs) are 100% donation based. The communities which most enable piracy are the communities most supported solely through donations. Pirates do a lot of donating to keep their hobby going.
Personally I’d be thrilled to see people who go off half cocked, don’t understand what they’re complaining about, and don’t bother to do any research before making pronouncements about whole communities all leave Lemmy. I don’t need this place to be just like reddit.
I’m fine with 4chan-like communities peacing out
There’s nothing 4chan-like about them, or me. I’ve never used 4chan. I just like to research things before condemning them, which I realize can be a rare trait.
If you don’t understand connection between chans, torrent sites, and piracy aggregation idk what to tell you man.
I’ve pirated a ton in my time but I’m sane enough to realize
A) it’s fuckin stealing, which is always wrong, but often largely victimless with digital media
B) allowing it on your aggregator sites invites problems of all kinds
C) if you are blindly pirating shit and trusting torrents you are part of a botnet and don’t know it
Not that it matters to my central thesis, which that if you run a community-oriented server and you in good faith decide you don’t want to host piracy-supporting content, you should have that right, but sure, I’m happy to address this:
Here’s a thread where someone is asking “Where can I download this copyrighted thing?” and a bunch of people send him links to where to download it. It took me all of 90 seconds of clicking around on the banned subs to find that.
No, they’re not literally uploading movies to the pictrs installation or something so it gets served back from lemmy-ui, but yes they are specifically asking “where can I pirate this thing” and getting links back. People have been sued for way less than that, for just in a general sense “allegedly promoting pirating content.”
And, personally I wouldn’t want that on my instance, either.
The post says, “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.”
Source? I’m sure it happens some percent of the time, but my personal observation and limited experience has been roughly 100% obnoxious-ad-supported and roughly 0% “please donate if you use this service” supported.
Are you passive-aggressively referring to me here? I.e. I failed to research how much money piracy communities give back to the community, and if I had had the real knowledge I wouldn’t have spouted off? If so, can you send me a source?
Also, can you walk me through the logic behind being willing to pay for content, but not willing to pay the authors, but still being super responsible about making sure you pay your fair share to someone who isn’t the authors to keep the hobby going?
That is not hosting pirated content.
Lemmy.world will be sued, repeatedly. It is going to happen, most critically because of non-compliance with GDPR, but also because all social media sites get sued regularly.
Which is exactly what I’m saying, that is not banning the communities on the presumption that they host pirated media.
You’re using terrible public trackers that are full of viruses and bait files the media lobbies use to get your ISP to send you threatening emails. I could provide sources, but under the rules you’ve just outlined that would be a violation of the “never talk about sites that provide access to piracy” rule.
Suffice to say that piracy fundamentally could not and does not survive on ads. It is 99% supported by donations and (at the very tippy top) subscriptions. None of the legitimate sites worth using for this purpose have ads (unless you’re really into streaming pirated content instead of downloading it).
Again, nearly all of piracy exists solely due to donations and subscriptions. People do this as a job, and they cannot run ads without exposing themselves far more than is smart. If you’ve ever pirated something and seen the name of a release group at the end of the download name like Razor1911, Empress, RiseHD, etc., these are people or groups who do this for a living and are paid for their time by fans (and sometimes very exclusive FTP communities). The knowledge it requires to do some of the things these pirate groups do is highly specialized, and it requires a very sophisticated understanding of programming to do something like crack Denuvo. No one with that skill set is doing it for free (or ad money).
But to walk you through the logic of it, media isn’t readily accessible to all people, and certainly not equitably. Some media is banned outright in other countries, some is released after a long delay, some is only sold at exorbitantly high prices out of the reach of the majority of people. These are people willing to pay a reasonable price for the content, but not what’s being asked of them. Further, in certain industries like video games, there is next to no incentive or motivation to preserve media to be accessible by future generations outside of what pirates do. If you want to experience any previously released Grand Theft Auto game as it existed when it was released for example, there is no legal way to do that. They’ve been stripped of their music over time as their licensing contracts expired.
Finally there are people who pay strictly because it’s more convenient. Rather than paying for Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV, you can pay one fee to one service and get access to all the content you want, which through methods I won’t mention here can be automatically downloaded for you as soon as it’s released and made available to any device you want with no action on your part. Pirates deliver a killer service, and some people just want the best service rather than the one that pays the most to studios.
Right, that’s fair enough - I was describing it as hosting pirated content, but it’s not, it’s “just” linking directly to it. Fair play. I still think the direct links and the communities specifically devoted to linking and education for an illegal activity is way beyond what any instance operator should be required to support on their instance.
I would prefer to minimize it, and make that outcome less likely. Wouldn’t you? Or is that not important to you?
I would argue that an instance admin who doesn’t want any or all of those three things to happen on their instance shouldn’t have to, and no one should give them any shit about it.
What is your source for this?
Can you really not see the irony in saying how much time and difficulty it takes to do these things, and that it’s not sustainable without a model that makes sure that they get paid and they need to be paid because of the time and effort and skill involved to create these things… I tried to highlight the irony and you doubled down on explaining how critical it is for the people involved to get paid 🙂.
In some situations, I can see some merit to this. What percentage of what’s going on on these forums is this? Versus people who e.g. just want a game and don’t want to pay for it? Would you say that an instance operator who doesn’t want to support the latter should have to, because the former exists?
I mean, I could steal my neighbor’s electricity and that would be a killer service, way better than paying the electric company. Then, I could resell it for less, and it would be a great deal. I feel like you’re deliberately missing the core ironic element I’m trying to highlight here.