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.
Replace the context of this about art thievery, and guides about how to steal art from museums, then think about how it sounds. You’re right, discussing those things would technically be legal, but c’mon now. I don’t care or judge if you do these things, but discussing how to commit crimes in a public forum, no matter what it is, shouldn’t be much of a debate among administrators to decide to ban or not. It’s safer to just do that even if it’s technically legal. If the cops come knocking, why would they bother lawyering up for these communities when they can just hand them off to another instance that would rather advocate for them?
If you’re against the decision, the entire point of the fediverse is to have the freedom to hop to a different instance if you disagree with its administration, so why not find one you are better aligned with? Keeping the fediverse happy as a whole with less user conflict is more important than user retention per instance; no one should feel locked in.