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Official Statement from Lemmy.world admin about community removal
(alexandrite.app)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
188 points (98.5% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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?
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?
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.
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.
Mine runs 24/7. Even if i hosted it at home it would be 24/7. Only issue is
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.
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.
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.