Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

2y ago

Unremoval of Piracy Communities @ lemmy.world

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
❤️

116 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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?
- 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

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

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.
  
  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 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 :)
  
  My eternal wish has been for Paintnet to be on Linux. Pinta is pretty good but Paintnet is actually good.
  
  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.
- 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.
- Wheres it going?
- 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.

We're back, baby!

Nice, I won't need to switch to other lemmy instance to visit this community anymore.
- Actually fully swapped because of that

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

Finally.

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

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!

I created this user in this instance because I knew this would eventually happen.
I'm happy with my choice.
- it’s time to welcome these communities back again
  That they'd be welcomed back?
  
  Not my brightness moment.

Good.

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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

“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
- That's kind of how it should work everywhere though. Cher figured that out about Sonny eventually for instance.
- Don't you have a subreddit to try to be funny in?
- And we Love every single downvote you got from these fine people, too ❤️

116 comments