Honestly, I don’t blame them one bit. People need to keep in mind that these instances and sites are provided for free by private individuals and not large companies with armies of lawyers. I wouldn’t want to fight a potential lawsuit for “enabling piracy”, no matter how much bullshit it is. If the admins of dbzer0 have taken the necessary precautions, great! Just join their instance if that’s what you’re looking for.
Pretty sure all the piracy communities I’ve seen have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content. Mainly its piracy discussions.
Here is a whole ass post from the admin of this instance about not directly linking: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18438
This post is linked under the main rules of this community, Rule 3. Don’t request of link to specific pirated titles.
Meaning this is a joke of a line of reasoning, you’re not “protecting” anyone by limiting discussion.
Yeah but the piracy subreddit also had those rules and various companies still sent notices to reddit. Sure they were bullshit, but copyright law puts the burden of proof on the alleged infringers not the copyright holders.
Someone here claimed they were in the Netherlands, turns out that’s not true they’re hosted in Finland.
I didn’t know the USA’s DMCA applied to the country of Finland. Reddit still got them because they’re a fucking US company based in the fucking US.
This shit is like people not understanding that The Pirate Bay didn’t have to follow US laws back in the day. Infuriatingly fucking dumb.
Ruud, the main admin, is in the Netherlands, the server is in Finland.
Are you forgetting when the FBI still came after Pirate bay? And that the founders would have been arrested had they ever entered the US or any country with an extradition treaty?
Lemmy.world is hosted in the Netherlands, which are notorious for going after people just for “promoting” piracy. They don’t care if you’re actually breaking the law, they will just make your life hard. And that’s not something I’d want to deal with in addition to hosting a free service.
No. It’s hosted in Finland. Ruud is Dutch, though.
You’re right, I must’ve gotten that mixed up. Still, Ruud is based in the Netherlands and I’m not sure how the hosting laws work across country borders. Strangely enough, the-federation.info lists lemmy.world as hosted in the United States…
I asked about that a while ago and apparently it has to do with a VPN or something.
Yeah, they use CloudFlare so it would look like that.
Although he posted that he had to follow strict German anti piracy laws 🤷🏻♂️
Because the company with the servers in Finland is German.
Interesting that they wouldn’t say as much themselves in any of their writings about why they made this decision.
EDIT: Turns out its not true. No Shit, Sherlock.
Yeah, these are not company run sites with monetization plans. People saying they’ll show them by leaving is funny, since these instances cost money as opposed to making money so I don’t think they’ll be sad about less overhead. People here aren’t paying customers but guests being invited to use another person’s instance over self hosting their own.
If people want uninterrupted access to this instance they can sign up to this instance, self host, or look for instances located in a country with less strict laws that might lower chances of defederation from here?
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Excatly why I never opened my instance. With it just being me, i can control what is on it and what is synced. There was too much risk with CP/CSAM type stuff. Heck I didnt even want to risk my linode account (aka they shut my other VPS systems down) due to TOS from shenanigans.
That said, I can still contribute just fine with my own instance and dont have to be involved in these drama defederation actions.
I would encourage anyone that is willing to criticize an instance maintainer for their decisions on risk to just roll out the lemmy-ansible setup and go your own way. If you troll or act in bad faith, you will get defederated. If you act like a reasonable person, no one will even notice. And that way you are in control of uptime, patch cadence, backups etc.
Does self-hosting still have the problem of not being able to find communities since nobody on your instance had followed them?
I was looking at self hosting for my normal browsing stuff, with all the porn and questionable stuff defederated or blocked (and keep this one exactly where it is on dbzer0) but I mostly just browse all, and I’ve heard that’s the same feed as subscribed on tiny instances.
Any insight on that?
I have NSFW unchecked on my instance, so no porn is ingested/federated. Also because its just me, i have to seek out communities to federate with via search.
I did this via https://lemmyverse.net/communities and changed the linked names to my domain and just ran searchs to start the federation for the specific communities i found interesting.
It does mean things like “Local” is useless and subscribed and all are the same filters since its only stuff i subscribed to.
Occasionally I will browse one of alts on a different instance and check all, or local there and see if theres anything interesting. I have also re-run through the link above here and there to find new communities to join. Those are probably the biggest “pain points” in that it takes more effort to find new communities. But once you start the feed its fine.
I also use different default filters on my alt’s in different instances (ie: ALL:HOT on lemmy.world) or whatnot if im feeling like finding new stuff. But honestly the lemmyverse stuff gets like 99% of the content here, and theres been a dip in participation, so some communities are idling (which just means I dont see anything)
Cool thanks for the breakdown. I appreciate your time!
A few questions as you’re self hosting an instance and I haven’t read much about it yet.
Are you hosting it on personal hardware?
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?Are you hosting it on personal hardware?
Not currently, though I am considering it. Right now I host mine on a VPS in linode. Though i need to downgrade it, I built it with the expectationg of allowing joins, but recently decided just to keep it private.
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
This wouldnt work. You not only need to have a routable/real domain name, but the server likely needs access to the internet to allow fro federation, specifically ingress traffic, to work.
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?
Mine runs 24/7. Even if i hosted it at home it would be 24/7. Only issue is
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I already use port 80/443 at home. So i would need to reconfigure NGINX to use a proxy, which could also break federation. I could do that, in fact I am pretty sure the ansible config uses NGINX proxy commands, just that I would have to customize it and Im lazy. I already have stuff on VPS systems in linode (blog, teamspeak etc) so its no biggy to have another one.
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My internet at home can be flaky. For example I currently dont have power at home and while I normally run on UPS for a time, and can cut to generator when I am home, my network just went into auto-shutdown.
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Yep. People were mad at Blahaj zone admins at defederating from the porn instances but holy shit the liability when it comes to these things is insane. People don’t seem to understand that an instance hosts a cache of all the federated instances that users visit. If something is hosted on one of the piracy instances that some corp doesn’t like, they come for everyone who has that data.
Except every piracy community on Lemmy so far has rules against direct linking… Sidebar Rule 3.
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To everyone ready with their pitchforks, here is a scenario: lemmy.world may receive a court order (subpoena?) mandating they disclose data on people actively accessing pirate communities. As it happened with Reddit, they may ask for logs and IP addresses of people commenting, posting or perhaps even up/down voting content.
Even though none of the content is being posted/hosted with this instance, admins may be asked to betray user trust - or to go battle claimants in court. It’s a lose-lose for them, so maybe let’s cut them some slack, eh?
Yup, they’re a big target and being a big target means more liability. Spreading the fediverse is good for us all. It means taking down piracy is like whack a mole.
This needs to be said more. They did their best.
I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:
- Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
- The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.
It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.
That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:
- I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
- Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
- Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
- Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.
Yeah, I’m not sure why some people assume it’s a problem. I’ve had a few accounts now. I went kbin to Beehaw (liked Lemmy more overall) to LemmyWorld to Lemmee (initially as an alt). Now Lemmee is the main. And if that goes sideways, well, I’ve got at least 3 other instances I’ve got my eye on as potentials. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
It honestly makes a lot of sense to keep illegal content that’s the source of frequent legal actions away from the largest general purpose communities. As you correctly point out it is extremely easy to join another instance where these discussions are allowed, and the larger instances have every reason to have a “better safe than sorry” approach to content moderation.
It seems to me the Threadiverse is too negative of the concept of defederation. It’s a key concept of how the Fediverse works, and is supposed to work. The people on Lemmygrad is looking for a completely different experience from the folks over at Beehaw, so let them have it. Lemmy.world has become the largest instance, so naturally they need to have an approach to content moderation that is unlikely to land them in legal trouble. And even if they didn’t, they’d be welcome to block discussions of piracy out of moral conviction or any other reason, just as their users are welcome to sign up somewhere else if they are looking for a different experience.
There was drama about defederation on Mastodon in the beginning as well, but I guess people coming from Twitter had an easier time intuitively understanding the appeal of it.
The problem with your reasoning is that these communities aren’t providing/hosting any illegal content. Furthermore, “legal” where? US law doesn’t apply outside of the US and vice versa.
My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don’t.
The fediverse doesn’t need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn’t be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter “e” is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).
Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it’s fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It’s simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.
If you don’t like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It’s literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.
It isn’t pedantry as there aren’t discussions of illegal content occurring either. If I talk about torrents (not illegal) I’m not breaking the law or discussing anything illegal. Neither is a discussion about Qbittorrent or Jellyfin. Neither is a discussion about the hardware needed to seed 1000 different Linux ISOs. Don’t let your ignorance of the topic blind you.
Can you point to the illegality of this post? https://beehaw.org/post/7156567
Do you agree that !gaming@beehaw.org should also be defederated now for posting illegal content?
Also, I am already using a different instance if that wasn’t obvious enough.
Hmm I shall possibly join that community to boycott this symbol, too.
Nice to see some discussion about it besides “lemmy.world sucks!” Pirates should be used to having to make a bit of effort to help avoid the corpo Eye of Sauron. The bigger a community you are, the bigger a target.
The beauty of all of this is that I can just switch to an instance that doesn’t defederate or is very prone to not do so. So far kbin has been very good and doesn’t defederate much, which is awesome
Would be nice if there was a way or an app that ties together all those individual accounts into a single view.
Absurd. None of these communities are even hosted on lemmy.world.
lemmy.world has more downtime than France’s administration anyway,. so at least we can still sail the high seas while they’re down.
Absurd. None of these communities are even hosted on lemmy.world.
This is the answer, period. They aren’t hosting infringing content, they’re barely even linking to discussion of it. Most of the piracy communities here on Lemmy all have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content.
It’s a fucking joke by people who think they’re doing something to protect their users but are actually just fucking around wasting time and energy.
they are, post and comments are mirrored on all federated instances.
piracy communities here on Lemmy all have rules about not directly linking to any infringing content.
Which are worth nothing in the case of a legal battle.
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Who do you think the instance admins are? These are normal people, techies who know about running a server. But without a legal department.
They’ll not be eager to even risk a court case.
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This is why I host my own private instance. It allows me to subscribe to any community I want without having to deal with anyone’s crap.
I left Reddit because of bans, shadowbans, and powermods. A few weeks on Lemmy and we now have bans from powermods. This sucks.
Difference is you can choose not to be part of the instance
And then just go participate from the instance that got banned like nothing even happened
Difference 2 is it’s not really powermodding. At least not from the way I personally understand powermodding. Imo powermodding is when a mod decides to get rid of content they personally just don’t like.
In this case they got rid of a big risk to the instance itself, because, if someone decided to upload pirated content on here it would get federated to all instances that haven’t blocked the one initially distributing such content. Like another user said on this topic, this could be compared to torrenting, only without the direct P2P distribution. The risk of course falls on the people hosting the instances.
Since they host these instances pretty much for free aside of donations, that are not a requirement, and the fact that, like nanometer said, you can just choose not to be part of the instance (and register to another instance), I wouldn’t put blame on the admins of lemmy.world in this case.
Is that really the case though? They are saying they didn’t want to risk legal troubles which sounds reasonable to me considering they’re just your average people with a hobby.
Not every instance is good for every user or community. The Piracy communities have long been some of the biggest communities on here, however it’s absolutely within the rights of the world admins to decide they don’t want to support them? If you object, you don’t need to throw a fuss about it. Just move yourself or your communities to an instance that’s online with your viewpoints.
If you object to people expressing their displeasure, you don’t need to throw a fuss about it.
If you object to people objecting to people expressing their displeasure, you don’t need to throw a fuss about it.
The crazy part about it is, that even if every instance blocked everyone, you could always host your own instance and I think if you host one just for yourself and maybe a few friends or something it probably wouldn’t even cost a cent.
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Just use an instance that isn’t lemmy.world. that’s the benefit of decentralization.
Besides, that server feels way too much like reddit, and not in a good way.
The difference is that now you have the option to go to another instance and still access the same content. It’s not ideal but much better than yhe community being permanently gone.
To be blunt, lemmy.world has always seemed to emulate reddit too much for my comfort, even in vetting registrations. 9/10 of the bad enlightened centrist takes I’ve seen here have come from lemmy.world users who are clearly reddit transplants.
Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance, it makes sense that they attract everyone even those type of people. They don’t understand the concept of distribution, of course they’re gonna go where the number is largest. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s the admins fault for the people that went there.
“Though a 1/4 of a Burger may be bigger in their eyes than a 1/3 of that same Burger, the ingredients stay the same.” - Winston Churchill
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Opinion duly noted
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Guy is all over multiple threads fellating the world admins.
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That´s one thing I GENUINELY can´t wrap my head around with lemmy in general. How is it, that the admins of one lemmy instance feel responsible for what gets posted in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT instance to the point they feel the need to keep their own members from even seeing it? It doesn´t reflect negatively on firefox, that they allow me to access piracy sites. It doesn´t reflect negatively on gmail that they allow me to use their email address to subscribe to piracy stuff. Why would it reflect negatively on lemmy.world, if their members also accessed piracy stuff? Are the admins of lemmy.world somehow responsible for what their members do, even if it´s not on their own instance?
Because the content their users subscribe to gets copied to the lemmy.world servers. At this moment they host these posts.
Are the admins of lemmy.world somehow responsible for what their members do, even if it´s not on their own instance?
They are not responsible for what their users do, but for what is saved on their instance. And by any lemmy.world user interacting with content from a different instance, their lemmy.world will host a copy of that content. That’s how lemmy works.
So if a lemmy.world user subscribes to a pirate sub, that whole subs content is now mirrored on lemmy.world.
Not just related to piracy that’s a huge liability issue for admins.
Oh boy, I didn´t know that. What´s the reason of doing it that way though? I mean, since I discovered lemmy, most if not all drama related to lemmy being a good platform came down to the fact that certain instances blocked certain other instances OR even to the question why an instance DIDN´T block another instace that had some right wing shit on it. Seems to me, having your instance simply copy over everything might be more of a liability at this point.
Well I don’t know why it’s being done like this, but my informed guess would be:
Resilience. If the content wouldn’t be copied, defederating/blocking an instance would mean that the content you created there (topics, comments, etc) would be lost to you. So if you wrote a nice comment, or saved a bunch of topics for later, and then your instance blocks the other instance… that would be gone for you. With the copy this doesn’t happen.
Performance. Instead of having to deal with every user (from a different instance) individually, your instance only has to deal with other instances. With this updates between each other can be sent in larger chunks (and definitely with less network connections). Additional benefit: smaller instances don’t get knocked down by user-heavy instances when they host a popular community.
Just guesses tho.
All social media is a liability time bomb unfortunately. That’s why only the biggest players can afford it so far.
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But piracy instances aren’t hosting the pirated content either. It’s hosted on seperate servers and it is only linked AFAIK.
Yeah I think the reasoning is stupid in this particular case. But there are good reasons to defederate from instances due to the content they allow in some cases.
The funniest thing is that even Reddit allows r/piracy
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A fucking shitty homophobic/transphobic troll at that. Great job, lemmy.world, you fucking geniuses. /s
Seems more than reasonable. In every case like this, I try to ask if I was in their shoes and I had that level of responsibility, what would I do?
I think anyone minded to check our piracy content knows where to find it and can register to one of those instances. This allows lemmy.world to remain a general purpose open instance for people migrating who don’t yet know what they are after.
This could actually be an incentive for people to move away from world and that gives a little more space for people to move across and dip their toes in the lemmy ocean.
One of the L.W admins has said that it could be a temporary measure and they are just seeking advice about their legal exposure. They’re also going to speak to one of the admins over here. So it might just resolve itself.
I already made an account here, I honestly can’t count on lemmy.world to not defederate or block random communities. Even if they take back that decision I still don’t have as much trust in them as I once did.
The nature of federation and defederation makes it sensible to have a few accounts, to get around defederating and as general backup in case your home instance goes down. I imagine some apps will allow you to combine feeds from different accounts and this issue will be smoothed over.
I think the liftoff app already has a feature like this, it’s been a bit buggy for me though, but that might just be because of lemmy.world’s uptime issues due to the ongoing attacks and maybe it would work better if I didn’t have a login for lemmy.world on the app.
“We decided to apologize instead of asking for permission.”
What is it they should ask?
“Should we stay federated with a community that has the very real potential of producing content that is illegal for us to share and in turn risk getting sued?
[ ] Risk your livelihood so we can continue accessing the content
[ ] Be lame and preemtively defederate”
I just hate that I now need an account for every stupid instance there is, including keeping an eye open in which community is suddenly blocked. Tedious but at least them blocking is useless.
It’s not useless - they’re not trying to keep you from coming here, they’re trying to avoid liability for themselves.
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Lemmy.world is filled with morons thats for sure now.
The LW admins are assholes.
EDIT: Rooki in the LW Discord is defending the behavior and calling the people trolls. He’s also trying to say that the admins make mistakes and should be forgiven.
You have to remember that these are people that left Reddit, which was notorious for a self reinforcing echo chamber they are about to be rudely awakened by the harsh reality of freedom of speech. People are either going to buy their bullshit or leave no amount of whining about it. On our end. It is really gonna fix it.
