this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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:

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

❤️

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[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 223 points 11 months ago (2 children)

That's nice of them to walk it back. Definitely not something you'd see Reddit do

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 129 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Yeah, it was a nice surprise for sure. I'm glad to have the lemmy.world crowd back, plenty of booty for all.

a pirate chest full of doubloons

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

Glad to be back! I miss hearing about piracy news

[–] SweetMylk@lemm.ee 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Reckon they were also losing users cause of this decision.

[–] addison@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 11 months ago

Definitely. I migrated my account after they took an anti-piracy stance.

[–] DingDongBell@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ye basically me, left right away to lemme.ee

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[–] moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 11 months ago

yeah I sure love lots of booty

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[–] Dadifer@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] beSyl@slrpnk.net 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A weird one. You create content and its shareholders buy new yachts.

[–] Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

Exploitative and at the same time very user unfriendly. Weird one indeed.

[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 5 points 11 months ago

The new Digg

[–] Apollo2323@lemmy.dbzer0.com 82 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Dbzer0 is one of the few I have seen making Lemmy better and better.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 24 points 11 months ago

It's honestly the perfect use case for Lemmy too. It's the kind of thing where decentralization is hugely helpful.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 11 months ago

Aww shucks :)

[–] antik@lemmy.world 69 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (14 children)

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.

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] antik@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

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!

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[–] Fhek@lemm.ee 47 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.

[–] 30mag@lemmy.world 77 points 11 months ago (3 children)

DMCA takedown requests are kinda "guilty until proven innocent" instead of "innocent until proven guilty."

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 31 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There are international agreements about copyright law designed specifically that prevent the loophole you're thinking of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty#:~:text=and%20knowledge%20industry.-,Implementation,behalf%20of%20the%20European%20Community.

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[–] LufyCZ@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 11 months ago

They do, unfortunately

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[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 11 months ago

Lemmy.world has a bad habit of acting preemptively first and asking questions later.

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[–] wintrparkgrl@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago

The companies don't care if they have legal grounds. The threat of legal fees are enough to make most places comply

[–] Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world 36 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] JonEFive@midwest.social 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] sounddrill@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 5 points 11 months ago

Krita and photogimp also come pretty close :)

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[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Still don't trust them, they recently censored the fosscad community without announcement or warning.

[–] FMT99@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] rezz@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

We're back, baby!

[–] ami@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nice, I won't need to switch to other lemmy instance to visit this community anymore.

[–] Batbro@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago

Actually fully swapped because of that

[–] Jok3r@lemm.ee 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Great news, that's a whole lot of people having access to this community again!

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago
[–] Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 11 months ago

I created this user in this instance because I knew this would eventually happen.

I'm happy with my choice.

[–] Gamey@feddit.de 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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!

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

very cool people

Am I correct to assume this also means people who know a thing or two about this thing or two?

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