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

1y ago

It would appear lemmy.world has blocked this community

sh.itjust.works What happened to the main Piracy community - sh.itjust.works

It’s gone. Wanted to ask over here before I went to check on Reddit.

!piracy@lemmy.ml has also been blocked from lemmy.world.

edit:

Lemmy.world has released an official response.

387 comments

To be honest, it's not a huge deal. The copyright cartel can easily send dmca requests to your isp just for having text guidelines. Not everyone has the bandwidth or energy to deal with stuff like that.
I just wish this wasn't done at the request of a transphobic racist who just did it to get back at is for getting banned for making transphobic and racist communities in this instance.
- Keep it up db0, a lot of us across the fediverse appreciate what you've built!
- Don't need lemmy world anyways. This is the most based instance on the entire fediverse. Their loss.
  
  One of the most popular instance. This is why federation is necessary and people should create accounts in different servers instead of pulling everyone to one server calling it tge "official" or "main" server
  
  At least they blocked a community and not the entire instance. This is how these things should be handled, imo
- Yeah, they fell for the fucking troll. Excuse my french.
- So beehaw was right whey they defederated from .world, there is shadiness there...
  PS: this is one of the best communities in the fediverse, good job.
  
  Beehaw's reasons for defederation were completely unrelated to what's happening now. They didn't want the general public to have access to their "safe" community.
  
  There's nothing shady here, just kneejerk and protectionist.
  Beehaw defederated because they they decided they didn't want to actually moderate their communities. Easier to just screen everyone before letting them join, to weed out people they may potentially disagree with. Ostensibly to filter out hate but only a fool thinks it stops there.

Fucking Lemmy.world is hot garbage. They're down every day and are constantly defederating with any instance that doesn't fit their narrow, sanitized world views. It's also one of the most recommended Lemmy's with more new users going there than anywhere else. I think it incredibly damaging in the long run to have 50% of active users on this platform to be centralized on one domain. Especially if this domain makes as many boneheaded decisions as lemmy.world
- I think it incredibly damaging in the long run to have 50% of active users on this platform to be centralized on one domain.
  I agree, but 50% is still better than 100%. I definitely appreciate that I'm reading about this while being totally unaffected personally rather than just disappearing entirely like what happens with a banned subreddit.
  
  We badly need Lemmy clients that can merge instances even if they're defederated, as well as the other way around, filter out entire instances even if your instance won't defederate from them. Letting instance owners dictate what you can or cannot see is not the way.
  There are clients that will do the former (eg. Liftoff) but I'm not aware of any that will do the latter. I don't understand why, it can't be that hard to filter users and communities by instance.
  
  Yep, I agree. Yet another reason I just spun up my own instance and use that.
- A lot of people register there initially to get their feet wet and move on to another instance later for these reasons. At least we have subscriptions/blocks transferring tools now.
  
  Yep. I started there, found it down all the time and then moved on.
  
  I did it the moment they decided not to defederate from Meta. I don't like admins who can't take decisive actions to protect their users (and apparently seem to bend their knees to any big corpo out there)
  
  I'm fairly new, what are the tools?
  
  This is what I did.
- I think lemmy.world gather the kind of redditors that like sanitized world views, the power of decentralization makes us choose an instance without those hot garbaje takes as lemmy.world.
- 100% spot on. I got called all sorts of names for pointing this out, but maybe my own fault for pointing it out on one of their posts! 😅
- I started on lemmy.world because it was the most popular server at the time and I didn't really understand how the fediverse worked. I spent the first month sort of just learning to stop trying to think like I was on reddit. The federation feels to me like pirate TV/ ham radio, people broadcasting their visions and worldviews while rebroadcasting other stations/nodes. Each instance, has it's own "feel". I see the entire instance I'm on as a greater solarpunk community, which is filled with smaller, related communities of people all sharing their own interests.
  This is a memory of how the Internet was first envisioned by many people, before the corporate takeover. I am interested in FOSS, I am interested in "piracy", I am interested in any exchange of knowledge that helps us work together, spread skills, and empower communities, both virtual and on the ground.
  But all that aside, lemmy.world is just too unreliable for it to be my entrypoint into the fediverse. Which is why I looked around and found a place that feels more in line with my own sense of hopefulness for the future.
- They should have shut down registrations a long time before they gained such a majority of users.
  They stand behind the lie that "if we didn't let people in, they wouldn't know where to go"... as if it's so hard to create a new registration page that re-routes people to other instances.
  I'll never understand the selfishness of people like that. They know they're actively hurting all of lemmy, but they want to keep all the users to themselves. This thing only works if it's a collection of smaller instances.
- Let the garbage go there
- @tron @Madbrad200 Fucking Lemmy.world is hot garbage. They’re down every day and are constantly defederating with any instance that doesn’t fit their narrow, sanitized world views.
  welcome to the fedi, first day here? :guraKekw:

This feels like an obvious bullshit cop-out reason to defederate against a specific community that they don't like for whatever silly reason they can't reveal to the public.
Never have I seen an actual link to content survive very long on lemmy.ml or dbzer0.com. Just like the good old /r/Piracy we discuss piracy, but we do not directly facilitate it.
Someone please slap the back of their heads repeatedly and aggressively with these facts. This excuse is disingenuous as hell.
If you are a user of lemmy.world; RUN. NOW! Find a new instance. Switch away from them before they reach terminal enshitification velocity.
- enshitification
  You're already misusing our cool new word. Cut it out.
  
  Too many people don't know what it actually means.
  
  The enshittification of the word enshittification has started
  
  No. It is enshitification. Do not @ me.
- I guess, someone with a copyright background came knocking at their door. It's one thing to defend against a lawsuit if you are a big for-profit company with a well-funded law department and a nice financial buffer. But it's an entirely different thing if you are hosting a non-profit platform with your own money because you are a nice guy.
  Tbh, I am negatively surprised how many people don't understand that the person hosting a lemmy instance is someone who does it as a hobby and not a big corporation.
  The good thing about Lemmy: if you don't like an instance or it's admin, you can just host one yourself. You just need a Pi or an old laptop and a few hours of time. Did you try that?

And just like that I learned about a Steam Deck piracy community.
Something something Streisand Effect.
- TBF it doesn't seem like they were against piracy per se, they just wanted to avoid potential liability. That said, I've still moved on to another instance.
  
  This 100%
  I don't know why people are making this dramatic, this was absolutely a functional and pragmatic decision.

https://lemm.ee/post/4235833
A transphobic troll got spanked and then retaliated with that post and the .world admins were stupid enough to blindly follow the directions of an alt-right turd.
Just saying.
- Not just transphobic but racist as well and going by the posted pebbleyeet memes probably also fascist. Sad that the lemmy.world admins took the bait especially after dealing with constant ddos themselves for kicking off their own trolls
  
  It's comedy how wishy washy they are on not federating with Meta despite bunch of their users saying they hate Facebook and Zuck but are convinced to defederate from us by a single post from such a suspicious account.
- I just saw the same user on the star trek instance, accusing them of being into 'nerd shit'
  It's doubtful they posted to .world with genuine concerns. They just seem like an agent of chaos.
  
  ‘nerd shit’
  On Star Trek? Imagine that! (I've been nerding over there, off and on, all day) 🤣
  Incidentally, when I looked up that user earlier in the day, they account was 8 hours old.
- Source for this person being transphobic? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know where this is coming from..
  
  About 5 shitty memes that are now deleted, that's what this post is in response to in the first place.

And the fact that I can see this means sh.itjust.works hasn't, yey
- neither has lemdro.id!
  
  Nor lemm.ee. And hopefully that won't change.

I think this is better tbh, I personally don't like it when piracy forums/sites/whatever piracy related thing goes too mainstream. Maybe it's gatekeeping, I don't know, I just don't want another Z-Library incident.
Either way, they probably aren't even against piracy, they're probably just lazy and don't want to deal with any of the issues they could potentially face down the line.
Edit - grammar
- I kind of agree, with the caveat that I think it'd be super cool if the existing dbzer0 members also checked out other communities on different instances and made Lemmy more popular. I feel like that would be a win-win.
  The more mainstream and well-known dbzer0 becomes, the more likely it is to have problems because of that.
  
  For this community in particular, I think having a "federated community" would be especially helpful. Piracy communities will inevitably be taken down, but distributing them across many federated communities turns it into a game of whack-a-mole.
  dbzer0 is no exception to this. There will be a time that the admin will start receiving DMCAs and will need to choose between complying and throwing themselves into legal jeopardy.
  Unfortunately, the lemmy project maintainers and lead devs seem largely uninterested in such a feature and I lack the skill necessary to implement it, so it's down to an invested and skilled community member, if it ever happens.
  
  We already do :) It's all federated so dbzer0 members can view/subscribe/participate in other Lemmy communities.
- ZLibrary never went down fully. There were always ways to access it.
- i honestly think the z-library incident was a one-off because it was spread by colleen hoover fans on tiktok so i'm hoping that it won't happen again... but maybe that's just wishful thinking :/

Hi Lemm.ee. Bye lemmy.world.
- The guy who started this whole thing by asking lemmy.world admins to defederate with lemmy.dbzer0.com is a lemm.ee account and he has asked lemm.ee to take similar action
  
  Doesn't matter who started it, all that matters is how the admins handle it. If all it takes is a new user asking for a community or instance to be blocked/de-federated and it just happens no questions asked, the admin in charge are to blame, not the person for asking.
  
  I'm pretty certain the lemm.ee dev won't block it. Time will tell.
  
  who is it? what is it?
- I'll tell ya a couple of three things, my estimation of Lemmy.world as a general-purpose instance just fucking plummeted.
- Best comment

Lemmy.world is dogshit. It feels like a nanny instance or like a reddit 2.0. Idk why people keep joining that bullshit instead of spreading out.
I'm so happy that I joined a small instance that hasn't defederated or been defederated from anyone
- Go be a shepherd and encourage people to move elsewhere
  
  Well it got me to move, so something is working.
  
  That's what I'm doing. 2 people already said they're gonna switch!
- Hmmm, your chosen instance interests me
  
  Haha. Nice name. Simple. Elegant. I like it.

wow it's almost like having a huge chunk of lemmy's users in one instance is a bad thing. who would've thought.
seriously though more people should migrate to smaller instances.
- It makes me wonder if and when we'll see clients that also act as single-user instances.
  
  I've been saying that for a while, start a service where you can pay x€ per month for self-hosting your 1 to 5 users instance, that makes it easy to get it started via a few choices, and I'm sure it would be very popular.
  If there are any code-masters out there that want to partner with someone that can lead the vision/sales/UX aspect of it, hit me up.
  
  I'm going to host my own instance and I will be the only user on it. That's the best option for me at the moment.
  
  instances need to be constantly online under the same domain to receive new posts. you can't really host an instance from your home without some kind of tunnel or ddns setup, and you surely can't host one from a potentially metered mobile connection.

I will just subscribe here from my porn account then.

Hello all. First post here. Moved over from lemmy.world because of this.
- I joined as well. New to Lemmy. Never even heard of dbzer0 until that post. There have been a few complaints of .world degenerating other communities as well. Streisand effect.
  
  It's not really a Streisand effect, because .world doesn't give a shit if you go to those places or not - they just don't want the liability of you doing it from their instance.
- Arrrr

Made the switch from lemmy.world the other day due to this. Not necessarily because of who they defederated/blocked, but because this happens with little/no consultation or communication with the user base. The frequency of it became frustrating; who knows what other community/instance will be blocked on a whim next?
I appreciate that the LW admins do this as a hobby in their free time, but things like this could be approached in a better way, or at the very least with better communication. I found out about this via a post in /c/mildlyinfuriating, which in itself was mildly infuriating lol.
Migrated to this instance, and I can choose via Connect which instances or communities I want to see. Should have done this sooner.
- Beehaw pulled the same crap. Weeks ago. Glad they rejected my sign up.
- Is there anything to discuss in this case?

federation works as intended
Dumb mfs: FUcK lEmMy.wOrld pOwEr tRipers rreEEeE
Guess which is the reddit clone.
- Good to know just so I know to go to an instance that doesn't block this community. I don't blame .world for being careful. This is indeed the Fediverse working as intended.
  
  I think that people are more upset that it was done only after a troll complained about it on the support or admin community.
  
  Many of us have at least one secondary account, for whatever reason. Lemmy instances are run by people, but some entitled assholes are acting like admins are musk or something.

Its fair enough. They gotta protect their ass.
I just logged into a user made on this instance. Problem solved. And lemmy.world has had a ton of downtime anyway. Always trouble loading comments and often trouble loading posts

I don't hold it against them. They have their hands full at the moment with DDOS attacks. The admins are barely able to keep the place running. The beauty of federation is that we can pick and choose where to sail from.
- And yet they insist on keeping registrations open and tarnishing the lemmy name with their shit uptime and terrible, terrible decisions like this. Fuck them.
  
  Based Lemmy.zip admin above 🙏

wow, and they only announce it in their discord. fuck lemmy.world
- Yeah, that part was pretty fucked up. The LW Admin made a statement about it saying it was a mistake by a newer member of their team and that from now on all announcements would be posted to the announcements community on .world.
  
  Yea just throw the new member under the bus

That’s funny because lemmy.world has been blocking every community for hours on end multiple times a week on a seemingly regular basis. Their shits broke.
- They aren't doing that intentionally. They're being DDOSd into the ground by someone(s) using SQL commands specifically crafted to hamstring their database. You can read about it here if their instance is up.

I find funny that we all are raging about this dumb move, and lemmy.world ppl can't because of the blocking lol.
- We were notified through a c/Mildly Infuriating post. True pirates are used to having to make some effort to get their content!

If I was on that instance and subscribed to this community, I wouldn't see these posts any more? If I wasn't paying attention would I even know it was gone?
- That's correct. No you wouldn't.
  
  This seems like a significant flaw. Anyone know if that's purely a UI issue or if the protocol itself makes it ambiguous which communities are blocked?
- You would be unaware.
- This sub disappeared from my subscriptions on my .world account, but it was a c/Mildly Infuriating post that tipped me off.
- I think you would stop seeing new posts.

Thanks to their post I discovered !steamdeckpirates and a second piracy community.
- Same lol

Lemmy.world sucks, it's constantly down and they block communities people want to federate with, and leave communities federated people want blocked.

Moved over here from .world. kthxbai!

Guess my alt account has now become my main account. Thus, the Lemmy dance continues.

Meanwhile all kbin users: 🫢🍿
- Someday maybe there will be a kbin api so more apps can utilize it.
- Also just anyone on any other instance
- Right? Like oh no, well sucks to sucks l.w lol.
- Yeah man, started on kbin and its been my favorite so far.

Oh no... Anyway

Lemmy world is turning into Reddit v2 or Twitter v2. I'm happy about my decision to leave that dumpster fire. Let's hope this nonsense helps others to migrate as well.
- Lemmy world is turning into Reddit v2
  Not really, even Reddit still has piracy related subreddits (at least for now).
  
  It takes a lot of effort to be worse than Reddit.

Wow, I mean all instances are free to what they wanna, but banning a sub seems extreme
- They must be paranoid about thinking that even the slightest link to any kind of pro-piracy conversation or community will get them sued into the ground.
  
  Sounds more like stupid than paranoid.
  
  I think the admins dug themselves into a hole tbh - last week they preemptively defederated from an instance because the admin doesn’t agree with their political ideologies and said that people from that instance might break the Lemmy.world rules so they need to be banned up front. Now this unhinged person posted a thread pointing out that piracy is against the Lemmy.world rules too, so they kinda had no choice unless they wanted to look like hypocrites.

.world has already become a shithole echo chamber. Good thing lemmy's technology can not really let it take over the platform as a whole like it did with reddit.
I've been liking .zip so far.
- I'd be scared to have an account in something with .zip domain. Could be that some big players start to block that domain (Google, isps).
  Though I guess you just make a new account if shit hits the fan.
  
  funny thing is afaik google is the one who's registering .zip TLDs
  or at least they were until they sold google domains to squarespace
- Enjoying .zip myself.
- I wanted to try out zip but unfortunately I think zip domains are blocked on my network since it fails to connect normally but does work through Tor or a VPN. I also tried connecting to other zip domains (not just the lemmy instance) and I got similar results. Would work on Tor or VPN but not on my main network.
  At least I now have an account here though, which is probably good enough for now.
  
  Try using an alternative dns. Some isps DNS servers don't know how to direct a .zip tld

Was there some context or discussion about that over there? If I recall correctly, lemmy.world is hosted in Germany, right? The lawyers there are quite extreme when it comes to cracking down on piracy; is a whole business model.... So maybe .world is just overly cautious
- I'm on a german instance (feddit.de) and it's federated with db0.
  I think it's just lemmy.world bullshit.
  Has anyone read their post about their downtime?
  "We shouldn't close registration or limit the amount of communities because we're not even the biggest instance in the fediverse"
  Like, what?! The argument was always that they are the biggest in Lemmy! It felt like they were trying to gaslight the users.
  Same as the other arguments, like new users being weirded out if they can't register to lemmy.world or apps using them as default. So them being down all the time doesn't matter? Or that lemmy.ml was the biggest instance and closed down registration and new users registered to other instances without a problem?
  I'm really weirded out how hard they try to be the "main" thing on Lemmy.
  
  Almost like an "intentional and kinda aggressive lib takeover". I wouldn't put it past the admins to try monetizing their users at some point.
- Just released an announcement, see the pic in the post.
  
  that announcement is also a buch of horsecrap
- Fucking Germany. Like I get having the laws, but they are being abused for absolute nonsense.

Nothing of value is lost. 😂

This sub just got a new member. Thank miss Streisand :)
- Same here =) just because fuck Lemmy.world
- When Kbin releases his API I'm gonna be there too!

Never thought beehaw would end up being more based than lemmy world.
- People that use "based" unironically are fucking idiots...
  So are the rest of the people who say it really... Fuckin idiot
  
  Cringe

The legal environment around Lemmy is tenuous at best. Content and / or actions that are legal in one nation are illegal in others but Lemmy caches that content on every federated instance with active users.
To illustrate the complexity involved consider a Mexican user on a Lemmy instance located in Germany that visits exploding heads to view Nazi content. Which nations laws are controlling?
What about when an Australian user on a Finnish Lemmy instance who accesses something like fauxbait from lemmynsfw.com? Those images are arguably illegal in Australia but who has liability here? The Australian user? The Finnish Lemmy instance? Lemmynsfw.com?
In both of those scenarios the User is one country with its own set of laws, the Users Host Instance and its content cache are in a 2nd country with a different set of laws, and the instance hosting the content is in 3rd country with yet another set of laws!
It's the same problem with digital piracy, who is legally liable when the law, and remember we don't even know whose laws apply, is breached? The User? Their Host Instance? The Content Host? All of them?
Legal lightening is absolutely going to strike a Lemmy instance soon and no sane instance operator wants to be the lightening rod.
- Just replace "Lemmy instance" with "blog", and the answer is obvious.
  "consider a Mexican user visiting a blog located in Germany to view Nazi content."
  The user is subject to Mexican laws. The blog owner would be subject to German laws. The instance owner is likewise subject to German laws.
  Adding additional parties doesn't change anything. For example, if a Mexican user on a Swiss VPN views content originating from a blog in Germany, then the user, the VPN, and the blog are all subject to laws of their own jurisdiction.
  Those laws can regulate what content you can access, what content you can host, or both.
  If you are American then your Lemmy instance is most likely be protected by section 230, and you probably don't have to worry too much about non-pirated content. If you live in another country or host pirated content in the US, then YMMV.
  
  Exactly, users and hosts are subject to laws around using and hosting in their own jurisdiction. Instances caching posts are hosts.
  
  Just replace “Lemmy instance” with “blog”, and the answer is obvious.
  Actually it's not because there's no 3rd party like there is with Lemmy and especially not a 3rd party that's keeping a cache (copy) of the content.
  If you are American then your Lemmy instance is most likely be protected by section 230...
  So there's no American users on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or even lemmy.world itself? You'd be very very wrong in that assumption.
  or host pirated content in the US, then YMMV.
  Aaaand we are back where we started. What is "hosting"? Your lemmy "home", lemmy.today for me, has a cached copy of all the content it's users view. So if I retrieve illegal material my instance has it too and while it's hidden it IS retrievable by both the Instance Operator and other users (if they know how).
  So whose door(s) are the cops kicking down in the raid? Mine? Lemmy.Worlds? The one at exploding heads / lemmynsfw / db0zer? All of them?
- Have the User, User Instance, and Instance Hosting be in these three separate areas:
  In both of those scenarios the User is one country with its own set of laws, the Users Host Instance and its content cache are in a 2nd country with a different set of laws, and the instance hosting the content is in 3rd country with yet another set of laws!
  Simple, have any of them be located in either or all of these three territories that have no legal justification at all:
  Bir Tawil
  Marie Byrd Land
  Small pockets of land between Serbia and Croatia

This is ultimately why I decided to roll my own instance. I'm keeping my backup here though in case I mess something up, but full control is nice to have.

Yeah, had to swtich instances because of that.
- Same

The best part is lemmy.world notified its users of this change on...discord. lol
Great social media site, where you notify end users of major changes on another platform entirely.
- Yeaaaah, that's sketchy. I can understand them blocking the communities out of fear of legal risk. They didn't sign up for that kinda risk and we all know that piracy oriented sites get targeted by legal action (isn't there currently an ongoing attempt to get Reddit to turn over user info about people who accessed piracy communities there?). But why the heck would they hide that they blocked the communities?
  It's the same as with Hexbear. I can understand why they defederated from that instance, since I've seen how they comment. They're extremely aggressive. Even when they're right, they're assholes about it. And they're often straight up supporting Russia, which is batshit crazy (they have no nuance, acting as if there can't both be Nazis in Ukraine and Russia can also be an evil aggressor). But Lemmy.World was happy to silently defederate until they got called out. Even despite the fact that for Exploding Heads, they at least had a big post about it (even though Exploding Heads is far worse).
- discord
  TBF their instance was probably down at the time

The real question in my mind is: how do we ensure the instance this community is on doesn't get shut down? Seems to me like c/piracy itself might be a legal target, and as far as I can tell, none of the instances are big enough to have legal teams to sheild it from legal threats
- Can we just emulate the rules that the torrenting subreddits use? They still exist after years.
  
  There have also been some lawsuits. And Reddit has huge lawyer teams.
  
  I thought those rules were pretty much "talk about torrents but not about content"
- how do we ensure the instance this community is on doesn’t get shut down?
  Make sure the instance is located in countries which are anti-censorship?

Honestly, I'm ok with it. Piracy shouldn't be something that anyone can see. More something people find after looking for it. Yes there is the con to having less users but the more users we have the more risk we take on.