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.
Lemmy.world is a similar situation for the opposite reason. It’s a free service that does not make money. A bunch of users saying they won’t use it anymore is meaningless because they cost Lemmy.world money every time they use it.
If nobody uses the platform then there is no reason for it to exist. The fewer people who use it, the less functional it is as a social medium. Pretty obvious shit.
If every single user of Lemmy.world, or even a significant majority, leaves because they’re no longer able to discuss piracy, I’ll fight both Zuck and Musk in a cage match. It’s all hot air from a very vocal, overly entitled minority.
But Lemmy.world isn’t the whole platform, it’s just an instance of it. You’re right if the people are saying “I’m leaving Lemmy forever!”, but most are saying they’re simply moving to other instances.