This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
So Reddit can but Lemmy can’t? Sad.
Well, a quick reminder that Lemmy.world is not all of Lemmy. Nintendo, the RIAA, the MPA(A), and other lawsuit-blasting organizations would have to tackle every single Lemmy instance.
Sure, one threatening letter is all that’s needed to scare most server operators, but since there are a large variety of hosts located in jurisdictions around the world, it’s not as simple as taking out the big player like it might be for Reddit.
The unfortunate truth here is that Reddit is a company and Lemmy instances are usually run by a few individuals.
We just don’t have the politic barrier or resources to stand against the pressure