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.

[–] sab@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

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.

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