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 mean… Yes?
For most websites to be functional, they need to be moderated. If you let anarchy reign, it’s not some utopia like I’ve seen a shocking number of people online claim that it would be. It ends up with a lot of racism, hate speech, doxxing, threatening violence, illegal content being posted, users being harassed, and other terrible things. Most people won’t want to be part of a site like that because it isn’t accepting or welcoming, it’s a dumpster fire.
No one should have come into Lemmy.World and thought, “Huh, this is going to be true freedom! I’m going to start advertising selling cocaine!” Maybe they’d want to, but the site isn’t just anything goes. They’re trying to run it on the open web and draw in a stable community. To be clear, I’m understanding but unhappy about the decision to ban communities about piracy. But criticizing a website by saying, “I thought you said anyone could come in, so why do you have rules, HUH?” That’s bullshit!