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.
This is a prime example of why I suspect we’ll see a lot more lemmy instances with a more narrow focus over time instead of just a few super lemmys. Its only keeping them indexed that will be a problem so that they can be found.
I wonder if that’s the point, I mean it probably is abit much to be the biggest name and have a lot of people attempting to join. That was the whole goal was small narrow focus instances, so by intentionally provoking members that tend to be more techy and understand how to change instances, they’re pushing them to help grow other instances and help limit flow into lemmy.world.
Or not, I wonder if soon it’ll make sense if instances become more democratic and allow member voting (that have been apart of the server for some time) for decisions like this, people will be mad either way (especially with only two options of fed or defed) but letting it be clear that the people are ok with it.