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.
Federated content gets copied between servers. So even if a community is owned by another instance, all of that community’s content gets copped to Lemmy.world’s database. Try searching the same post on two different instances and notice how in the URL they have different /post/id, because each instance copies the post over with its own unique ID. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m guessing “this content originated in X server” is not a valid legal excuse.
Keep in mind the World team is pretty small. They probably don’t have the funds to fight legal battles. As they weigh these decisions, they are likely trying to avoid the risk of lawsuit that could easily mean the end of Lemmy.world.