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.
With federation, the content is shared between servers, that’s the act of federation. It downloads the posts from the other instance. So it would then be stored on lemmy.world, the only way to stop that is to defederate. The mobile apps mostly solve this problem as you can view content from lemmy.world and choose to add other instances, but the browser version isn’t setup to work that way, so it’s less than perfect, but it’s supposed to be easy for this content to exist all on its own and only show to other users in a single place when they want that. So if the admin team is afraid the largest community on a small and growing platform won’t have the means to fight a legal battle no matter if it is legal or not (I’ve been hearing a lot of legals), I get their reaction. hell reddit could easily target and crush Lemmy.world in court if they wanted to kill the platform. It isn’t much work as unfortunate as it is to go to that instance for that content