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.
Who do you think uses Lemmy in the first place? Normal users or pirates? This is not a shift of gears that will get the advertisers flocking, and this will not suddenly open the doors to the hidden cache of users that were not around because of “pirates.” Not to mention, instead of this action, what should have been done is to warn the instances and ask them to follow the rules they had on Reddit, where users are not allowed to link to pirate sites.
This wasn’t done to get more users, it was done because an instance wants to protect itself. But in the end it doesn’t matter why it was done at all. Just access those channels you want another way which is the point of the fediverse. Nothing of value has been lost by this decision. Everyone can still access those channels using their favorite app just as before.