Lemmy.world deleting posts with archive links and posts questioning the decision.

Lemmy.world has somehow decided to become to extreme defenders of “copyright” and decided they will now delete posts that contain archive links in an absurd move that not even corporate websites like Reddit do. Archive links provide a service to provide access to an article long after it is deleted or changed.

They made this post and locked it immediately so no one can comment on how ridiculous it is and they’re deleting threads about the decision…

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/6711646

The LW admins have requested that communities remove any posts that include the entire article or archive links to articles.

A short summary is allowed, but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. This includes links to sites that rehost copyrighted articles for paywall sites.

If your post is removed for a rule 1 violation you can edit the post and let the moderators know the copyrighted material has been removed.

Thanks All!

Jamie,

If I had to guess, they’re probably not doing it just because they want to. It’s entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation. Or they’re afraid that they could face litigation if they don’t take action.

We shouldn’t assume ill intent unless there’s something to substantiate it.

lurch, (edited )

They probably got a YMCA request or whatever that’s called 😉

hiddengoat,

Given their history of freaking out, breaking things, then weeks later totally reversing their decision... it's clear that lemmy.world is not run by grown-ass adults. They drama freakout over way too much stuff.

PowerCrazy,

Surely if that were the case they would let their user know right? If you aren’t open about the reasons, you are shit and should be defederated by everyone immediately.

SpaceNoodle,

If that’s the case, then they should be open and honest about it. We’re back where we were before with the one-sided, spurious, and uncommunicated defederation decisions.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

It’s entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation.

I kinda get posting the entire article in the post body but not linking to archives. Publications should then litigate against those archives if they think that archiving is illegal. It’s not like archiving services operate “in the shadows” or anything like that.

nxlemmy,
@nxlemmy@lemmy.ml avatar

They should’ve explained that in the post if that was the case. Not make a pinned post that’s locked with zero information. Also it would be a frivolous threat considering no website has ever had to remove internet archive links. If they want to threaten someone they have to threaten the Internet Archive not a tiny website like lemmy.world that is protected by section 230 and doesnt host any copyrighted material.

muddybulldog,

Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland. 230 is not applicable.

IzzyData,
@IzzyData@lemmy.ml avatar

I get the impression that one of the main goals of Lemmy World admins is simply to assert control over its users. Whether they realize this or not and are just doing habitually. There was a post awhile back about the feature of users being able to do instance blocking themselves and they were pretty against the idea of an instance that federates with everything in order for users to do their own moderation. As this would obviously take away their ability to control users.

In my opinion they are just bullies who have convinced themselves they are in the right.

stolid_agnostic,

This is pretty much what happened to Reddit, no?

wildginger,

Lemmy is going to have worse mod issues than reddit, and this is an example of how and why.

communist,
@communist@beehaw.org avatar

Not in the long-run. This is absolutely a temporary issue due to the beta quality of lemmy.

stolid_agnostic,

The difference is that this is federated and you can ignore any instance you like. With reddit, your only choice is to make a copycat sub and hope people join you.

wildginger,

Which sounds good, until you start to notice that most instances have functionally dead communities, and the majority of traffic comes happens on a small number of instances.

Lemmy doesnt have the population to have mass community movement, so mods abusing power in any of the larger instances means you shut up and put up with it or abandon the instance with 1/3 of the site content on it.

Power modding is going to be a much much larger issue here, while the community is still small. Maybe if there were enough users, federation might resist mod abuse. But as it is now (and will be for a while at least,) you basically are making a copycat instance or community and hoping people join you.

stolid_agnostic,

Hmm. Interesting points.

wildginger,

It doesnt help that mod tools here are very anti-user. Not even in a hostile way, the tools just arent finished or even made yet, so its very hard for users to play by the rules or know when theyre punished.

Like how you need to scroll through the modlog to see if your post/comment was deleted, and if youre lucky they might include why. Or how unclear and obtuse it is to check the instance global rules which change when you visit other communities, who themselves have a different list of rules.

These probably all have solutions, but thats gonna take time to build. And moderation is probably gonna be kinda wild west-esque until they are running.

stolid_agnostic,

A lot of why I’m reserving judgment is because everything is so very young still. It’ll take a lot of time and effort to develop it into something more mature.

wildginger,

Thats the same reason Im here. Learn the way this works while its developing, so if it evolves into a well developed community Ill already know my way around.

stolid_agnostic,

I’m also open to the idea that there’s really no good social media, even when federated. We may still have to deal with hateful and insecure mods, for instance.

ram,

Maybe if there were enough users, federation might resist mod abuse

This is key right here, but users need to be using a diverse set of instances. Lemmy.world needs to stop being “the default”. There shouldn’t be “a default”. Maybe for when you first sign up, but people need to be moving to self-hosted and/or niche interest instances. That’s the best way to prioritize diversity in the ecosystem.

Frankly, anyone who’s on a lemmy.whatever domain or kbin.whatever should be finding smaller, more manageable instances to move to as they discover the fediverse. This will be aided when 0.19.0 comes out in a few weeks and enables the export/import for accounts.

One thing I appreciate about how the incentives of the platform are set up is that, since there’s no global account counter of up/downvotes, there’s really no loss in migrating. As long as I can keep my communities, subscriptions, blocks, and saved posts, I’ll have lost nothing.

IzzyData,
@IzzyData@lemmy.ml avatar

I never really used Reddit so I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me that power over users is one of the primarily motivators of admins and power mods.

stolid_agnostic,

Or Facebook or whatever else

Sauvandu59,

old habits from reddit die hard.

MBM,

… because community mods will be forced to moderate comments and posts coming from all instances, which is unreasonable to expect from them. They wouldn’t be able to ban anyone because they can just make a new account on some troll instance.

IzzyData,
@IzzyData@lemmy.ml avatar

You are describing federation though which is what Lemmy is. If you want a centralized website this is not that.

cwagner,

They also banned the mod of a community, then lied about facts, and closed the thread discussing it. Oh wait, you were the user who got banned. Yeah, that was the point I realized lemmy.world is a bad instance.

Ziggurat,

Do not under estimate the copyright mafia. The pirate bay admins spent time in jail (and didn’t host anything).

Hosting copyright infringement is taken seriously, including civil damage which would definitely bankrupt a non profit organization. But it could result in jail time if the administrators don’t take action.

A small team like LW (or any Lemmy instance) doesn’t have a team of lawyers dealing with that shit. Please be kind with your admin and follow the laws, even the ones which suck

SARGEx117,

Even if you are 100% in the right the billion dollar companies can bury you in legal fees until you run out of money.

PowerCrazy,

Nah, Fuck off. Admins are under no obligation to enforce copyright of any particular country. They can easily move their hosting to some non-shithole or transfer ownership and move on with their life.

trebuchet,

This is total BS and people are upvoting it just because it sounds truthy.

Piracy links? Yeah, sure.

Archive links? Like OP said, even corporate Reddit allows those. The risk to a Lemmy instance from allowing this is literally zero. There is a rule of lawsuits among lawyers that you always look for the deep pockets because you can’t get anything from a lawsuit if the defendant can’t pay. There is no way Lemmy.world would be sued for this before Reddit, which actually has money to pay with. That’s even setting aside the notion that linking to archives could be found to constitute copyright infringement.

AnyOldName3,
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

Not that I agree that removing/banning archive links is sensible, but reddit has a much bigger budget for lawyers than any instance admin, so is in a much safer position with grey-area and black-area-but-no-one-complained-yet content. It’s not like reddit was ever particularly anti-piracy, either - the corporate interests they bowed to were advertisers and their shareholders.

RememberTheApollo_,

They won’t waste time on lemmy over this. They’ll send cease and desist letters if they care enough. Ignoring those would lead to a suit, but assuming people are immediately going to be dragged into court over the actions being discussed here is on the farfetched side. Even those lawyers and paralegals on retainer have a cost per man hour, so dealing with finding out who a Lemmy instance operator is and drafting the legalese is going to have to be a worthwhile effort for them over some article links.

DogMuffins,

you always look for the deep pockets because you can’t get anything from a lawsuit if the defendant can’t pay.

This is only for sketchy lawyers though? If you’ve been retained by a rights holder then you’re getting paid.

The risk to a Lemmy instance from allowing this is literally zero.

It’s not about the actual risk, it’s about being able to deal with the shit storm. If I hosted an instance for the lolz and started getting takedown notices I couldn’t be assed trying to measure the risk.

bug,

They’ve updated their ‘policy’, still with no accrual explanation that I can see:

The admin team updated the communities that they will allow archive links to be used.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Rule 1: “Do not post entire articles or archive links to copyrighted articles”

Also lemmy.world when creating a post: “Why not use one of these archive shortcuts?”

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2c9fee2d-0e1a-42e0-9b0f-01b4c05171f0.png

can, (edited )

That’s built into lemmy itself. If they want to be drastic about it they could fork it out I guess.

ram,

They could even just hide it with CSS

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

That’s built into lemmy itself. If they want to be drastic about it they could fork it out I guess.

Instances running slightly patched versions of Lemmy is nothing uncommon.

ptz, (edited )
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

I don’t agree with their decision, and I hope some transparency is forthcoming about what led to them taking such an extreme position. OTOH, I’m also not going to tell them how to run their instance.

Your post in the politics community did merit removal as it violated the rules. I don’t think that community allows “meta” posts unless it’s from a mod (I could be wrong).

Their admins are usually pretty transparent, so, again, hopefully more information will be presented.

In the mean time, just look for off-instance crossposts ;)

SpaceNoodle,

Transparency should be preceding or in parallel, not an afterthought. This is not acceptable.

Peaty,

Are you owed transparency regarding something you use but do not have any responsibility for? That sounds incredibly entitled to me.

SpaceNoodle,

It’s about trust, bucko.

Peaty,

That’s just your sense of entitlement talking.

SpaceNoodle,

🙄

IzzyData,
@IzzyData@lemmy.ml avatar

This is the same as their moderation style. They ban first and justify it later.

teft,
@teft@startrek.website avatar

Fuck them. I’ll continue to post the full article if someone asks for a paywall bypass. Information should be free.

davel,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

They’ve defederated from lemmygrad.ml: lemmygrad.ml/post/2347489

PowerCrazy,

Great news.

Ram_The_Manparts,
@Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net avatar

Yeah, for lemmygrad

PolandIsAStateOfMind,
@PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml avatar

Truly is, the amount of zionist bootlicking and call for extermination of Palestinians we see on lemmy sharply dropped overnight when we stopped seeing new .world posts.

nxlemmy,
@nxlemmy@lemmy.ml avatar

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    wild_dog,

    go back to reddit dork

    bug,

    No idea what the deleted comment you replied to said, but I’m a big fan of bringing the word “dork” back!

    PowerCrazy,

    lmao. Defederate immediately, just on principal. Let Lemmy.world know that once they stop being capitalist stoogies they can reapply for federation.

    iegod,

    This will not go the way you think it will.

    millionsofplayers,

    World’s fastest enshittifying?

    ram,

    This is a bad move that’s anti-community and user-hostile. Hopefully it also fucks over the monopoly they’ve been trying to get over communities. People need to stop defaulting to putting their communities under .world jurisdiction and use other, smaller, and more relevant instances instead.

    Rentlar,

    This is the inevitable consequence of being the largest instance, you get the most scrutiny from copyright trolls.

    From lemmy.world’s inception (and before), I along with many other Lemmy users have sang the chorus of: if you don’t like an instance’s policies, you can leave and join a separate instance!

    That’s the whole point of a federated, de-centralized model.

    aka_quant_noir,
    @aka_quant_noir@hcommons.social avatar

    @Rentlar @nxlemmy

    A policy is built by informed consent. There has to be a process and a reasoning and human hands who can be held accountable when things aren't done right. I don't think any Fedi instances are doing "policy" by that definition. And that's entirely because they don't want their users/trolls to use/game the system, I believe.

    Atemu,
    @Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

    The link you posted is a post by a mod announcing that they will enforce the policy given to them by the LW admins.

    From the modlog I can tell that (presumably) you posted a text post to !politics about the policy that was then removed.

    If you’re posting to !politics, such posts would obviously be removed because that’s A. not on topic (that’d be a topic for !lemmyworld. ) and B. not a link to an article. The latter is also the reason given for the removal.

    Stirring up drama over absolutely nothing usually ends up hurting someone. Could you not?

    fiat_lux,

    It's a real pity. Some of us use the archive links because modern websites ignore accessibility guidelines and create hostile UX. So many popups and animations and autoplay videos with sound.

    While I understand their motives, the result is a move towards an internet that excludes people further

    D61,

    jesus-cleanse

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