- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/2881638
The largest piracy community is hosted over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
lemmy.world has blocked it. It appears to have also blocked !piracy@lemmy.ml.
If this is a problem for you, I’d suggest migrating accounts using LASIM to an instance that doesn’t block it (such as lemm.ee).
edit:
An official announcement has been made:
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It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
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Yeah, it really can’t be helped. The piracy community can always just shut down and congregate elsewhere. It’s significantly harder for a more general community to scatter and reform.
Yeah… Shit I guess that will be my first sub on my Lemm.ee account
Right? Regular people have regular problems. No need to add on-top of that.
One of the best parts is that you can migrate your subscriptions in probably less than 5 minutes now as well!
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
What a snarky thing to say
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
To give credit where it’s due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.
Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim is already a pretty easy option
It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
Honestly, I just found this place first, and I don’t remember what I came here for. I didn’t make an account, then I did recently and now get approved. Lets goo. Options are great the advantage of the Fediverse is that you can always create a new server instance every time. Probably always changing your IP every time the server gets taken down and have none of the names associated with it are the same.
You are completely right, but account migration also needs to become available for situations like this.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Maybe I didn’t have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.
Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it’s the largest server, with the most users. 🙄
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn’t stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
its not a bug, its a feature! the faceless admins get to tell you watch content you can get now, not a faceless corporations! its so good that all the instances are starting a war with each other over the content they host because it means we have the choice of who gets to decide what content we like to see!.
I can sense the sarcasm of your post, yet the words you’ve written are actually true. This is exactly what decentralisation is all about. on some other websites you might lose access to the content entirely, on the fediverse you can just go there direct and still get all of the content, nobody can ever take that away from you except for the people who manage that content.
That’s literally the main selling point of this kind of setup. Nobody, faceless or otherwise, can stop you accessing any of the content.
This is basically what I did not that long ago.
This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I don’t think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
In 2018, someone maintaining a ROM site was ordered to pay Nintendo $12 million.
In late 2021, someone was sentenced to 10 years of prison and to pay Nintendo $14.5 million. That person got out on good behavior last April, but 25-30% of their wages are going to be garnished until their debt to Nintendo is paid off - which will likely take the rest of their life.
Great summary on this Episode of Darker Diaries from last week
Nintendo aggressively pursues copyright claims, often spuriously.
Here’s an article that has more details on what happened.
Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)
I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you’re going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it’s an unfair battle from the start.
I can’t blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There’s a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it’s protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.
I think people forget that decentralized doesn’t mean anonymous, and it also doesn’t mean that server admins and servers aren’t beholden to local laws
If you are hosting a discussion forum on a server that you are responsible for, does that automatically make you responsible for the content that people post on it? Even an instance the size of dbzer0 is impossible for a single person to moderate all of the content from the many communities that are federated with it. Impossible.
That’s like saying the admin of lemmy.world holds all of the wild political opinions that are posted on there.
When feds come a knockin’? Fuck yeah it does mean you’re responsible for them, yeah man. Lmao. We just had our server admin purge some pervert agenda pusher. Because first off thats fucked up and next it could have the server seized.
Some dusty law enforcement won’t care if its just one bad apple. Especially if they get whiff that its a “community”.
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me tbh. If you are harboring communities of sexual abusers or something, sure.
Here’s another example: I have some pretty fucked up fiction books in my house. Am I responsible for what the author says? It’s the same damn thing. Words written by a person who is not me, that are in my house.
When it comes to the legality of most things hosted on websites, that is how it works. The legality of piracy is different, for no reason.
Too many people in this thread are basically saying “discussing/assisting with piracy is illegal, move on” while having no opinion whatsoever on whether or not that is a just law. They just base their morality on what is legal and I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SAY WHY THAT CAN BE PROBLEMATIC.
People are fucked.
It doesn’t matter if the law is just or not - what matters is the legal risk to the lemmy.world admins and whether or not they are willing to take it.
I disagree that it doesn’t matter, even if it is less relevant to lemmy.world’s course of action.
many people in this thread are making moral arguments against piracy, and most of the people doing so are just appealing to the authority of the law.
but if you really want to have a discussion about the risk to lemmy.world, there wasn’t any yet. the piracy community also disallowed sharing direct links to files, and even in the event that lemmy.world had received a DMCA, that would have been the moment to do something about it, they aren’t liable for just hosting content unless they ignore one of those. acting like they are going to get singled out and have the servers shut down and raided because they might have a cache of some person’s comments from a different website where someone might have posted direct links to illegal files is a massive overreaction. This whole thing was set off by a troll that was mad that they got banned from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com for being transphobic and tried to tattle on the group like a toddler, not because of any implication that the risks were about to change.
not that anyone but the admin’s opinions matter in this case, it is their server. they could do anything at all and it wouldn’t matter to me regardless of it’s legality or risk. Doesn’t change that I’m not fan of large corporations or the people that bend over backwards for them, out of fear or any reason.
yeah, a decentralized link aggregator just works!
Wtf dbzero was a huge proponent of the fediverse and has been a part of the recent swell in users. I don’t agree with this decision at all
Only here because of my instance.
Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
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Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
EDIT: The post in question in case others haven’t seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
Not even reddit admins were this stupid
Reddit has lawyers they can call on to mount a defense. Im willing to bet this is entirely about liability
Understandable reason but there is not one illegally shared file in these communities. What’s next, watching a John Wick movie makes me a murderer now?
And now the account that redirected all of lemmy.world has been banned from lemmy.world for ban evasion.
This whole thing is weird
They should have asked them to change their rules instead. Sharing DL links can get the admin in trouble. LueLinks had to do away with it at one point too, and they were primo pirate site back in the day. I think reddit had r/piracy and other reddits change their rules - the one that had links to mushroom spore sellers (forgot the name) had to stop sharing links to sellers that sold magic mushroom spores (not an illegal thing to do). It’s tough, but admin made guiding rules, and that breaks one of them. Plus, if it’s on their server, it could be admins head on the chopping block.
Are you talking about a different community or instance? !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com does not allow direct links to content yet lemmy.world admins blocked it anyway.
True but it hosted in Germany. That country does not take it easy on piracy…
Even the German specific Lemmy instances like https://feddit.de do not block the piracy discussion communities.
The piracy blocking stuff seems like something lemmy.world admins decided to do based on a troll from another instance demanding it.
That user can sue if they don’t obey, in most jurisdictions. If it comes that far, it’s too late.
Why would the user be able to sue? Unless they thought their work was being infringed (in which case why they wouldn’t send a dmca?) I don’t see what possible standing they’d have.
Why are so many people still on Lemmy world. We’re supposed to be decentralized. One of the benefits to decentralization is that you can choose to avoid blocks like this. Stop centralizing!
Sync. I come from Reddit and that’s what my favorite client defaults to. It’s not optimal, because of the reason you say. I am totally OK with new apps presenting users with an easy “one-click” choice of instance to make onboarding easy, but having one accepted default has this side effect. If I were to maintain a Lemmy app, I’d probably select the “default” instance for a new user by selecting one at random in an array of popular instances, and then offer the user to subscribe to the official community of my app (wherever instance it’s on) to keep up. Maybe I can hit up the dev with some feedback on this on the official community.
And now, just like it ended up with Mastodon, I’ll have to maintain multiple accounts for Lemmy. Such a good user experience, it will totally catch on…
Seriously. Accept this piece of advice from someone new to the Fediverse. Being harsher on piracy than a fucking corporation and forcing users to migrate accounts left and right / have multiple accounts to be able to easily access content out of your Mastodon instance’s niche and having to get around your instance defederating and blocking content you wanted to see is just abysmal UX. Are we supposed to have our content scattered around how many accounts? And for those who don’t like mobile apps, at this point I can only use Sync (Lemmy) and Tusky (Mastodon) through my phone to browse the Fediverse for lack of a good option to maintain multiple accounts on desktop. Firefox containers are just overkill for this, but I welcome suggestions.
End rant, and sorry if it’s a long-winded disorganized ramble. Is lemmy.ml good to get around this block?
That’s why it’s a good idea to check an instance policy and maintenance before registration. (Or better yet running your own instance if possible)
Interesting. I wonder if it can run on my Raspberry Pi 3b+, or if the single GB of RAM doesn’t cut it, it will be up in my list of things to do together with immich, grocy, paperless-ng and NextCloud when I manage to build my real homelab. I’ve read enough horror stories about smaller instances disappearing so this seems like a good way forward?
Even then, I can’t say this is intuitive. I’m an advanced Linux user with sysadmin skills. I can pull this off in a few hours, but I doubt it’s the same for average Joe…
I’ve been enjoying !Lemmy.zip. We’ve only defederates from a few instances and it’s all by vote. It seems to be a good place to be so far.
That’s great. I think defederation should be a last resort option, as it weakens the ability of users tow switch instances, if they have to fear, to no longer be able to acces their former communities, resulting in the walled gardens which hold all those instagram users hostage unable to make the switch. and @chic_luke I can recommende tootle for desktop use of mastodon. It supports multiple accounts
For me personally having multiple accounts is no big thing.
Seriously, at least on Jerboa you can literally just swap between accounts. You can subscribe to certain communities on each account or just filter by All. People complain too much.
For one, my chosen server disappeared without any sign in a puff of logic, so I’m back here
My first two home instances disappeared
Indeed, might it be a good idea for the very long term, keeping an account active for a decade plus I mean, ensuring you have access to everything and all communities etc, to run your own instance that’s literally just for you, not publicly available?
It would cost pennies, after all. I was thinking about it.
(Setting up a private small group and sharing the burden of cost sounds even better. In that case there would be 5-15 people with limited/closed sign up)
In my case, I was on another instance that suddenly got flooded by people I profoundly disagreed with with their own meme-ridden culture that made it pretty unbearable. Lemmy.world seems more welcoming to the general public and less politically inclined as far as admins go. But dunno, maybe I’m wrong and I’ll hop again soon.
Join us at lemm.ee, sounds like what you want! It’s a general instance, no real politics. Just regular world news and stuff. I don’t really engage in much or the political stuff.
I just have multiple accounts for multiple use cases. It’s really dumb to have your piracy activity on the same account you do everything else on anyways.
Fair point, but it seems absurd to me that a supposedly community-based instance gets harsher on privacy than a corporation that’s about to IPO. That seems off to me. Then again: lack of a big legal team. Understandable. Sad, inconvenient, but understandable. I’m not mad, I’m just sad. Mostly because this legal war on piracy is not only on piracy, but on software freedom (DRM, WEI, etc) and privacy (for a lot of media, there is no privacy-respecting way to legally acquire it)
Another thing that seems off is that this announcement has been made on the Discord server. Now, I don’t want to come across as that guy. I admit I use Discord regularly, because that’s what my friends are on and all efforts to migrate them to something more privacy-respective have been futile, mostly due to the lack of fleshed-out and comparable alternatives for now. But… why should a Fediverse instance have an official server on Discord? I feel like it kinda goes against the whole philosophy of this entire thing. Then again I’m new, so I might be in the wrong here. But wouldn’t a Matrix server or something be a better fit for this sort of thing?
Then don’t use lemmy.world it’s that simple. Communities can have whatever outside connections they want. Lemmy.world is the big normie/liberal/redditor instance. If that’s not what you want you can always join another instance closer to your tastes/beliefs/management style.
Probably because there is not an easy toggle to migrate a user account to a new home instance. I know there are tools for it. But it won’t matter if there is not a button on a sign up page that says “migrate from another instance” that does it for you programmaticly.
And here I thought that Fediverse was serious about being an alternative to heavily censored platforms. Now I see it’s just a joke.
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The only thing it’s serious about is being a decentralized platform - if you want to access something, then choose an instance who’se admins are serious about being heavily censored.
It’s the old adage of “if you don’t like something, do something about it”
The fediverse gives you the tools and ability to surf the fediverse how you want, all through decentralization. Don’t like the rules on one instance? Move, simple as that.
It’s the same context of “vote with your wallet” - only put your accounts and time into instances you want to put your account on and only donate to instances you want to donate to, vote with your time and money, that’s how we can make this platform better, for ourselves and for others.
It’s not censorship, it’s just smart people protecting themselves from liability. Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
That’s why I moved away from lemmy.world. I don’t want such admins.
Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
But aren’t they protected under the same laws that other sites like Reddit are already protected under?
As far as being responsible for what their users post, last I heard that already had laws that protected the sites that hosted them so they were not responsible.
IANAL.
Legal / illegal is the wrong term here because this type of thing is a civil matter.
If you were a volunteer admin and receive a cease and desist notice from an expensive law firm with an army of lawyers representing a client with infinite money, what would you do?
Would you pay your own lawyers out of your own pocket to stand up for your freedoms and rights, or would you just roll over and let someone else take up that fight? Would definitely be the latter for me.
Legal / illegal is the wrong term here because this type of thing is a civil matter.
Has it been ever a civil matter for any other company that hosts? I have not heard of any lawsuits of any kind for decades at this point.
As far as I know this is completely and absolutely settled, with no concern about future litigation possible.
IANAL.
As far as I know this is completely and absolutely settled
That may be true, but it’s easy to say that as a third party who is not receiving threats of litigation.
That may be true, but it’s easy to say that as a third party who is not receiving threats of litigation.
Well I’m not saying it out of ignorance as a third party, I’ve actually read articles going all the way back to the time of BBS sites, where US laws protect those who host these sites from being responsible for the comments that people make that sit on their servers.
I don’t remember the exact law name right now (IANAL) but I know it exists, I’ve read articles about it before.
That doesn’t really address my point though.
Even if you’re 100% confident that you will ultimately be found blameless, most people would take action to avoid facing a civil suit.
A well resourced opponent will drag you to consultation. Even forcing you to respond to a legal demand is an arduous task. You might grind through it and even get awarded costs, but you’d have to bear those costs while you’re going through the process.
Point is, they can still destroy your resolve without winning a case.
Not like you can’t access their community anymore
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It’s not censorship, it’s a liability/legal issue.
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This isn’t “the fediverse”, it’s a single instance.
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You can move to a dedicated piracy instance like lemmy.dbzer0.com or start your own.
Exactly
I just logged into my user from lemmy.dbzer0.com instead of .world
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They banned the shrooms community too. So glad I never volunteered to help these people…
Go back to Reddit.
I’m late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin’s decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people’s idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It’s totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say “thank you for hosting us” and move on if it’s not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.
I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was “oh no what now” but with lemmy it’s just “time to move to another instance”
I love it. We will win in the end, against the corpos, they shall rule in Hell whilst we serve in Heaven
Normal people not wanted to put themselves in legal jeopardy doesn’t make them a “corpo”.
Uhhh I think you misunderstand the original quote
Not really, in seeking to gain power, they create something worthless by destroying what is valuable, but by working together, we create something glorious that none of us are really in charge of.
usually god, the ultimate authoritarian, is in charge of heaven. i’ll pass
Thank you for taking my metaphor too literally just for the edge
Ok … do people not think that lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers? Because lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers…
I guess it would be Hetzner instances, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470266, and it would be Hetzner who would get contacted and potentially shut down lemmy.world in their case. Let’s not even talk about the people launching DDoS’es against lemmy.world and how they could abuse it similarly.
It seems lemmy.world has only blocked communities, not entire servers in this case. I mean, get behind all the comments calling for a migration to “avoid instances moderated by clowns” and migrate all you want (wishing migrating was actually possible instead of simply creating new users), but I personally will stay in the server who has a code of conduct that considers legal concerns and doesn’t think that just because they are on the internet in a less popular medium that will eventually grow that it will get ignored.
I’ll just move if it gets taken down for incompetence or bogus reasons anyway, because all the dumb drama doesn’t really matter in the fediverse.
People are missing the fundamental point of defederation. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
You can have an absolutely squeaky clean instance for memes, news and generally huge sharing communities. Instances that dont have to worry about DCMA notices or having their servers seized and you can have instances that are willing to run those risks for niche content. If legal threats start being thrown around, the meme and hobby communities dont suffer. The piracy instances can shut down, migrate and start again, making the lawyers play whackamole.
ikr…feels like I’m taking crazy pills here. this is federation at work.
That’s basically the WWW in a nutshell, applied to the fediverse.
coerce police into taking into custody entire servers
Name instances where this has happened, other than on entire websites dedicated to piracy. And overzealous hosting providers who shut down entire servers over a single DMCA (especially when the site doesn’t appear to host any content) should be avoided.
But I agree that it’s his own instance and he should do what he wants with it; that’d be the beauty of federation.
An instance of lawyers coercing police into taking into custody entire servers? Sure.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/police-shutter-13000-sites-piracy/
Consider how common these types of seizures are, you can search for more on your own.
Did you miss the part “other than websites dedicated to piracy”? The kingpin was making 150k€/month from his piracy ring, not some guy running a small free message board.
So you want me to provide an example, in a topic talking about piracy, for a comment that was replying in regards to it … that isn’t about piracy!?
Have you looked at how much seizures police and interpol perform in IP? Do you have any reason to expect an exception?
Maybe you’ll find this link more relevant: https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-usenet-service-arrest-operator-seize-data-160325/
But there’s so many examples of server seizures for these sort of crimes, it’s almost bordering on the line of misinformation to claim otherwise.
n total, 10 search warrants were issued and 14 people detained or accused of IP crimes, including four who were arrested in Spain. According to Europol, the prime suspect in this case had been earning €150,000 per month and lived in a luxury villa, drove expensive cars and took luxury holidays all over the world.
really coerced them through legal proceedings, damn.
Learn about the legal process, it’s the lawyers who made the case before the court who then gave green light for those search warrants.
Given lemmy.world’s uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I’d be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao
i myself switched away from lemmy.world due to how unstable it is, glad i did so.
They don’t. The guy who pushed for it was a troll who made an account specifically to make a big splash and cause issues for the instance and its admins. Wouldn’t be suprised if bots were involved to upvote the concern troll thread.
The community in question didn’t even have anything illegal on it. The troll argued “well they discussed pirating as a thing that exists”. That’s great, do you push for the shutting down of every “true crime” community too? Serial killing is pretty darn illegal but talking about it sure isn’t.
Ouch!
What’s the fucking point. The community isn’t even hosted on lemmy.world. I don’t want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.
This is not difficult to deal with, setup an account on another server and stop using lemmy.world
No need to stop using LW. I’ve got three accounts on different instances plus kbin. Oh, and I fifth on if you count my nsfw login. Partitioning your online life is nbd, really. And the fediverse makes it easy.
Why bother to have 5, an account on a single decent instance should be sufficient.
Beauty of fediverse, people can just find another spot or move to another instance while most of the community continues no problem.
Just an example that system working as intended
but only if you know enough about the fediverse to be aware; if i had no logged into like i usually don’t do on these days, i would never know and spend the rest of my time on lemmy.world trying to figure out why i can’t find any pirating stuff to share.
I would think it would be the responsibility of lemmy.world to put up a notice of why they’ve done this, if they’ve not then that potentially reflects badly on them (but I don’t know enough about the details and reasons).
True, would have expected something in !lemmyworld@lemmy.world but there’s been nothing announced there.
Makes me a bit suspicious that there is any credibility to the claim. We’re going off a supposed screenshot of what looks like a Discord message?
True but nothing a little education can’t fix.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
