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.
Interesting the level of outrage. I guess if Lemmy’s userbase is heavily “Reddit users who were outraged enough to leave a private platform over entitlement towards free API access and come here” then it’s going to skew heavily “easily outraged”.
I don’t see a huge issue really - the whole point of the fediverse is there are other instances to go to. Some of them will lean more towards covering their asses, some will pop up (and get c&d and taken down and repeat) for the illegal stuff. Some will tell bigots to go fuck themselves and outrage racists, "gender critical"s, etc about free speech (this instance literally says it’s not a free speech zone so what are you doing here?). Others will happily accommodate it. Pick your poison.