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.
Your confusion about the litigous nature of the US is naive, and your gotcha is dumb and immature. Yes, you can sue for anything. No, that doesn’t mean instance owners should quake in their boots, but CSAM, and copyright issues are the quickest way to end up in a legally dubious place where the laws don’t matter morals are made up. People have been on the hook for the retail price of every single viewer of an illegal stream, into millions and millions of dollars.
The “this is stupid why won’t people take life-ending risks so I can talk about piracy when I could easily make my own instance, take the risk myself, and talk about piracy.”