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.
I don’t think this is a lemmy.world problem as much as it’s a Fediverse problem. Assuming that the only reason to block these communities is legal safety, we should figure out what is legally unsafe and see if that can be enforced on the piracy communities, or everyone in the Fediverse could also be at risk and should block these communities.
I know that the piracy communities themselves are already taking these kinds of measures to make sure they are not unsafe, so if anything is found we should solve it together. If push comes to shove, I suspect that piracy communities would rather restrict themselves than risk taking a stand and endangering others. It’s not that big of a deal to skirt legal concerns while still being a useful piracy resource - /r/piracy existed in much the same state.