cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6018317
Hello World!
As we’ve all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn’t want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it’s time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!
We know it’s been a rough ride with everything, and we’d like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.
With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!
Lemmy.world Team
❤️
That’s nice of them to walk it back. Definitely not something you’d see Reddit do
Yeah, it was a nice surprise for sure. I’m glad to have the lemmy.world crowd back, plenty of booty for all.
Glad to be back! I miss hearing about piracy news
Reckon they were also losing users cause of this decision.
Definitely. I migrated my account after they took an anti-piracy stance.
Ye basically me, left right away to lemme.ee
Same here, now I only use .world only for .world communities, .ee for everything else.
yeah I sure love lots of booty
Dude, I’m at work. Put a NSFW on that thing.
A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.
What’s reddit?
A lemmy clone.
A weird one. You create content and its shareholders buy new yachts.
Exploitative and at the same time very user unfriendly. Weird one indeed.
The new Digg
Dbzer0 is one of the few I have seen making Lemmy better and better.
It’s honestly the perfect use case for Lemmy too. It’s the kind of thing where decentralization is hugely helpful.
Aww shucks :)
The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn’t just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.
In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.
Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we’re definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.
Hi Antik, as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I was very happy to hear that you decided ‘unremove’ our little community. I appreciate you going to the effort of revisiting the earlier decision and being transparent about the process, and I’m sure that goes for the vast majority of the people here (though obviously not all 🤨).
While individual users were probably more impacted by that decision than we were as a instance (because they couldn’t access this community from lemmy.world), I can tell you that our admin team fully understood the situation you were in and there are no hard feelings from our side.
I don’t know whether there is a wider appreciation of the fact that managing a lemmy instance is quite labor intensive and technically challenging for the system admins, who are all volunteering their time and expertise. And there’s still lots of bugs and problems to identify and deal with.
Hey Unruffled. I know you had your opinion back when we made that unpopular move too ;) But whatever the users here might think, the contact between most instance admins over on the matrix channels is pretty good and helpful. We might not all allign all the time but there is always respect and understanding. And I think you can confirm that everyone just tries to help each other there no matter what the differences.
I contacted db0 soon after we blocked those communities and have always been in good contact with him since. He understood our situation very well. And as you know yourself Lemmy World has been very active and very publicly pushing the fediseer project. Again, we have our differences but we all want Lemmy to succeed.
Appreciate you dude!
You’re saying you can tell us that your team understood the situation fully? I know db0 was understanding. I also know yourself was trashing us for completely uninformed reasons and riding the hate wave when it happened. Time to leave that in the past, I guess. I appreciate choosing the peaceful way.
Can you post the DMCA notice you received? It should include what the copyright material was which would be interesting given it was discussion only.
No
Hmm, so you say there was a DMCA takedown notice but that the thread contained no material or links to material. You also say you can’t provide evidence of it even happening. Yeah, I’m going with you didn’t actually receive one and are just trying to retroactively come up with a good reason.
I don’t care dude lol. Why should I post this, we have always tried to be as transparent as possible over at Lemmy World. But we’re not going to release documents that would allow doxxing.
You would redact IP addresses and other sensitive information. That’s a pretty basic given. Regardless, you made a claim and can’t back it up therefore it didn’t happen. It’s really not a matter of you caring or not, it’s a matter of you just making stuff up.
It really is a matter of not caring. I wouldn’t waste my time either. It doesn’t matter.
I’m not even on LW but I think they have already gone out of their way to explain everything. But it’s never enough for some people. “I don’t believe you” ok sir have a nice day 👋
If it helps, Google publicly releases dmca notices that they receive on lumendatabase.org, with some details censored.
I mean, let alone that it’s probably not a good idea to poke the bear with an expensive legal team. It doesn’t always matter that you’re not doing anything wrong, if they can bleed you dry with legal fees instead.
based
Well who did the DMCA notice?
Thank you for your free and much-needed/appreciated work!
I’m assuming that the takedowns were send by automated systems scanning the net, but please correct me if this is wrong. Could hiding content from piracy related instances for visitors that aren’t logged in work to prevent automated falsely flagged content?
So they finally realized the person that convinced them to block the piracy subs was an idiot transphobic troll who was unhealthily obsessed with defending bungie, a faceless game corporation that needs no defense?
Shocker.
They state legal reasons, which makes sense. Better check things and be safe. Are there any more details etc. available about what you claim?
From a legal standpoint, I sort of get it. One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content. However, if the server is actively moderated and owners respond responsibly to take down requests, they should be okay - in the US at least, and assuming current protections for service providers remain intact.
I think a good option (if technically feasible) could be to have the choice to de-cache communities or servers that are questionable and make it so that data is transmitted live from the federated server when requested by a client. That would add load to both the local and federated servers though, especially if volume is high.
One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content.
This 100%. And not just piracy-related stuff.
Tbh, there have been some decisions by lemmy.world admins that i didn’t really support, but this one is understandable imo.
I wonder if the lemmy devs are aware of this and what steps can be taken to protect the instance owners from stuff in other instances that can get them in trouble.
Dbzer0 made that public right after the block occured, the person created a new acxount on lemmy.world with no posts just to retaliate. Not sure how much trueth is behind their new claims that they got multiple takedown requests but for some reason I was insulted for not knowing never mentioned or published, would certainly be a better reason but conaideringtheir past behaviour and complete lack of aknowledgment I am not too sure about that tbh.
Don’t try to tell them in their “community”, lemmy.world users are as nasty as always!
I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.
DMCA takedown requests are kinda “guilty until proven innocent” instead of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Not sure if DMCA requests matter to a server hosted in Germany, though.
Also, as they mentioned, their admins were overworked as is and probably just needed time to go through the requests to see that they’re all bullshit.
There are international agreements about copyright law designed specifically that prevent the loophole you’re thinking of.
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They do, unfortunately
Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
Only if they are legal requests, which in the case of a request to ban discussion, isn’t.
(And that is why one usually has a legal canary and a policy to publish any and all DMCA requests received, as I’ve seen some orgs do. Helps put the trolls on the spotlight and quickly detect unlawful usage)
The team could have perfectly asnwered by not doing anything at all, waiting a day or two to file a counternotice. Unfortunately the system is stacked in favour of the big pharmas of media, but it’s not like there is nothing that can be done.
It’s not that simple. A lot of the times these DMCAs are not sent to your instance email, they’re sent to your provider’s and they don’t give a fuck. They will tell you, “remove it, or we take down your whole server and all data in it”. You can send a DMCA counternotice sometimes, but eventually if you get enough bogus DMCAs, some providers just terminate your service anyway due to their hassle. It’s fucked up and the reason why lemmy.dbzer0.com had to change providers to someone more hostile to bogus-DMCAs.
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There weren’t any, it was just a troll account that asked admins at a bunch of different Lemmy instances to block anything related to piracy. Lemmy.world admins took the bait. Even in the original announcement they never mentioned anything about dealing with tons of takedown requests. In other words they were blocking piracy related content preemptively before any takedowns occurred.
It’s nice they walked back that decision but I’m still not going to create an account there.
Lemmy.world has a bad habit of acting preemptively first and asking questions later.
Considering the Fediverse is new territory, legally speaking, I can sympathize with a bit of extra caution from instance hosts who don’t have a team of lawyers backing them up.
Thanks for your insight, you obviously know what you are talking about. Can I have your sources on this please?
The companies don’t care if they have legal grounds. The threat of legal fees are enough to make most places comply
I’m really glad to have this community back. I got some good advice for getting tools to download a less financially vampiric version of Adobe Photoshop and premiere.
If you don’t need the advanced features of photoshop, paint.net is a good lightweight and free alternative. It has all the basic layer-based editing features.
Krita and photogimp also come pretty close :)
Photogimp? Is that like gimp for bitmap content?
It’s a GIMP patch. OSS and all. You can find it here: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
Nicee, will check that out when i’m next on my computer 👌
What I like about Photoshop is how much the program works for me. I had been using gimp before, but everything is done so manually. Photoshop does a good job detecting objects, and the quick select tool is so convenient. I will check out paint.net, but I like having software that does not require Internet as well.
My eternal wish has been for Paintnet to be on Linux. Pinta is pretty good but Paintnet is actually good.
Maybe one day GIMP 3 will come out
I unironically love your reply, because there are like 20 ways it can be read and replied to. That’s a good one.
I’ve found CS6 has almost every feature you’d want and it’s well over a decade old now. Much better in my mind than paying monthly for new features you won’t probably use
You could also check out the Affinity suite of programs.
Still don’t trust them, they recently censored the fosscad community without announcement or warning.
That’s why there’re are different instances. No one can force you to join lemmy.world just like no one can force them to host content they don’t want to host.
For those that don’t know what “fosscad” is, it was a community where they were sharing 3D printing schematics for guns and other weapons. Which is an entirely different legal nightmare with different laws in different countries.
Wheres it going?
“We love you… unless it’s not in our best interest to do so.”
It’s a FOSS not-for-profit social media platform. I don’t also expect unconditional love. LMAO
Lemmy instances are run by VOLUNTEERS! Lemmy.world is not a COMPANY. A company can have an army of lawyers. An instance run by VOLUNTEERS cannot.
If anyone wants to apply as our fall guy hmu
You’re acting like lemmy.world is ran by a corporation with plenty of power to fight back.
We’ll see you battling takedown requests and not being paid to do so.
All at the risk of a lawyer coming for your ass and closing the whole server down.They can’t touch my server its hosted on the moon
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Don’t you have a subreddit to try to be funny in?
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That’s kind of how it should work everywhere though. Cher figured that out about Sonny eventually for instance.
And we Love every single downvote you got from these fine people, too ❤️
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Nice, I won’t need to switch to other lemmy instance to visit this community anymore.
Actually fully swapped because of that
No acknowledgement or sorry for their stupid garbage and if you try to mention it in their “community” you won’t have a good time, definitely not going to follow anything on that instance except the shitposts again but good to see that they correct a mistake at all I guess!
Fuck Lemmy.world
Great news, that’s a whole lot of people having access to this community again!
I used to have an account on that woke instance. Left the dumpster fire for lemmy.ml. Not going to entertain obvious censorship on Lemmy.
You left a “woke” instance for one run by communists?
When did commies become woke?
People who use the term “woke” pejoratively usually don’t think kindly of communists.
Damn, I want your drugs!
Trust me you don’t want them!
if you think a cesspit like .world is “woke” what the hell are you?
Just a free-minded individual with strong views about freedom of speech & censorship.
A libertarian then? What are your views on the age of consent?
I have been advised by my lawyer not to give any public statements regarding this specific issue at this time!
brace noise
You are entitled to your views, but please don’t turn this post into a political discussion. If you want to talk about your political opinions, there are plenty of communities for that topic. !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is not one of those communities. Thanks and have a good day.
How ironic. You are the one who posted the topic doofus!
Yes, so people in our community are aware of the ‘unremoval’, not to hate on lemmy.world. It’s a move in the right direction and personally I’m glad they took this step. Everyone is so tribal nowadays, just chill.
I’ll be chill when you stop making corny comments!
No anti-“woke” voices are even remotely approaching getting “censored” or “silenced”. If they are then why do I have to hear about them every fucking day?
On the contrary, if you want to hear from a good portion of the population about issues that affect them you need some aggressively anti-racist anti-sexist anti-queerphobic etc spaces or you won’t likely get the chance. Isn’t hearing what real marginalized people have to say about their own experiences a million times more important than some vague worry about crypto-fash#56637 getting to say their piece which has already been heard and generally decided to be socially harmful and, importantly, silencing to the people their racist, ___-phobic etc speech implies violence to? A chilling effect as you
enthusiasts call it.Isn’t freedom of speech more about an individual having the right to hear from many viewpoints, than it is about an individual having the right to say anything and everything, anywhere, any time, they so desire?
This doesn’t sound like censorship, it sounds like they were getting legal threats directly levied at their volunteer team. I can understand the desire to protect yourself against getting sued for your (admittedly large) side project. It sounds like they are working on it in good faith though.
it sounds like they were getting legal threats directly levied at their volunteer team
In the spirit of transparency to the community, post pictures of the legal letters received. Or am just going to assume you are carrying out moderation ahem censorship on the instance.
sounds like they are working on it in good faith though.
Sure. All censorship starts out in good faith.
Firstly, let me be clear. This is my opinion as someone who isn’t, and has never been involved with their instance in any capacity. My account is with pawb.social.
Posting legal letters may open them up to additional legal liability, and it is completely reasonable to let the community know what happened without sharing the actual letter.
Secondly, you’re putting words in my mouth. I am not saying they are censoring in good faith. I am saying the complete opposite, that they are reversing their stance in good faith. In other words, they are uncensoring content in good faith.
Posting legal letters may open them up to additional legal liability
So it’s a case of their word against ours… Anyway, IANAL but I’ve seen other similarly positioned projects in the open-source software world post evidence of similar letters.
they are uncensoring content in good faith
You do understand that this means that at worst the legal threat did not exist in the first place. At best, the threat no longer exists. Either way, the damage is already done. I don’t see the point of walking back. You just don’t get to “uncensor” things after the fact.
What tf was woke about that or even better question what tf dose woke even mean by now?..
Trigger happy on banning communities/speech under the guise of moderation using a loosely interpreted TOS policy counts as woke to me.
That’s just shitty moderation and probably a overworked mod team, not sure what drug you got your hands on but I would kind of like to try it if you have any left!
Sounds like excuses to me and avoidance in tackling the real issues at hand (censorship of content).
There is a difference betwen cencorship and moderation and one of them is a must sve or you end up with 4chan 2.0 but in this case the decition was bad the the reasoning even worse!
I disagree. Lemmy mods that grew in size got trigger happy with the block button, just like reddit mods did/do. And uses the same tired excuses to justify their behavior.
Lemmy mods have a horrible and unthankful job, they get flooded with CSAM we never have to see and I didn’t experience any issues with mods so far, is it possible that the issue is related to the kind of stuff you post?
Finally.
