Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.
If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don’t blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won’t put them in the legal firing line.
Sony Music is currently coming after DNS provider Quad9 for resolving a piracy related domain, and they’ve succeeded in two courts so far. At this point I don’t think any copyright lawsuit is too stupid to happen.
I’m not saying they are or aren’t. I’m simply saying that we all know the big media companies go after people at the drop of a hat. They recently tried to get reddit to expose the identities of people discussing piracy over there. To their credit reddit told them no and defended themselves legally. And that’s the issue. The media companies can accuse anyone of anything if it even slightly smells like piracy and the target has to legally defend themselves. This is fine if you’re a multibillion valued company. Not so fine if you’re just some guy who just wanted to run a Lemmy instance out of his own pocket.
It’s be nice if there’d been some discussion first, and perhaps a solution other than an admin vanishing a community without notice. Even just some text informing the user “You can’t see this content on lemmy.world. Please go to the instance directly”.
Regardless if the decision is understandable, the method used here is not going to sit well with people. After how many years of spez, these kinds of behind the scenes snap decisions that change the site overnight with no apparent regard for the community is going to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. It wouldn’t have hurt to bring it to the community rather than just shadow banning without a word.
Not even because there needed to be a discussion, but just as a basic courtesy.
It doesn’t inspire confidence or endear the instance to its users.
But it links to it, which is equally as bad. In your logic thepiratebay would never have any problems with law enforcement because they technically don’t host any of the pirated content, just link to it.
This is a well reasoned answer. If this were my instance I would also ban communities linking to pirated software. A single lawsuit and lawyer bill for a regular guy, and that can fuck your life up all because you tried to run a decent community. I have a username I use for browsing lemmynsfw, I’ll make one for browsing piracy related things too.
Best bet I think is to set up a non-profit limited liability type of company. Then at least there is a good chance the individual doesn’t get fucked. (Ymmv depending on legal jurisdiction of course)
You still need expensive lawyers to defend yourself. Registering a LLC isn’t a get out of jail free card and corporations don’t shield you from personal criminal liability (unless you’re rich, see comment about expensive lawyers).
For me, it looks like people are mad at the US defaultism of the decision.
I understand why. It makes for part of the users no sense as they are protected by the law. It looks like a US “shitshow”. Countries are protecting the IP of the person, making it nearly impossible to pursue someone. Others have law allowing the use and the copy of copyrighted material for educational purposes. Some allow the download of copyrighted material.
It’s the same with GDPR. Meta must comply. There is no exception because US defaultism.
And we can understand this point of view too. It’s not binary as the US people think it is. It’s more mixed depending of the country.
Generally, outside of this drama, on the internet, people are reclaiming they right and don’t want the US “example” anymore. They want the internet following their local laws like the GDPR for Europeans. They have the right to claim it. Thanks to GDPR, mandatory usb-c, battery replacement and others laws in Europe and outside, the consciences of are awakened that the US is not the model to follow in terms of law on the internet and technologies.
Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
If Alice, a user of lemmy server A, subscribes to a piracy community on server B, all content of that piracy community will be pulled to, cached on, and served to Alice through their home instance, server A.
All it takes is a single user subscribing to a community from another federated server to pull that entire community’s data into their home instance. It’s bad when it’s a copyright violation risk. It’s massively scary when it could happen with something like child porn, because now whoever is running the home server is storing and distributing it unknowingly.
Eh. I’m a lawyer. I wouldn’t be afraid of the civil risk unless I was accepting donations. Suing regular people isn’t really a profitable endeavor. I’m more concerned about paying for the hosting and being subscribed to enough of the fediverse to have a representative instance.
There’s also those that sue for political reasons and not for money. Perhaps we need more lawyers to step up and offer their services pro bono to fediverse admins. The admins are volunteering their time for you. Might as well return the favor.
Yeah, but Rudd probably doesn’t have the expertise or resources to swat away people that knock on his door with threats of litigation.
And there are a lot of dumb ass lawyers out there that have no problem lobbing threats and cease and desist over the wall. I know, I encounter them all the damn time.
This sums it up pretty well imo. From a legal standpoint hosting a site like Lemmy likely isn’t going to be a problem in most countries (I know it isn’t in mine with some caveats) but that won’t stop the average lawyer from pretending otherwise.
I can’t really blame the lemmy.world admins here, rather I blame the laws that still don’t account for this sort of use case in terms an average human can read and be reassured by.
That’s a fair point. Anybody know of any servers hosted in countries where all this stuff is legal? I wouldn’t mind registering on the servers where my illicit interests are legal.
I see the decision you made as the ultimate end to this path you and lemmy world tread. At this rate all federations should defederate each other, or just shut down the whole fediverse. We can go back to individual hyper-specific forums on phbb again.
I mean there is obviously a line between what should federated and what should not. But i feel the reasoning here is fundamentally different then the others chosen in the past.
No one forces you to. What you do is called fear-mongering and catastrophizing. There are dozens of lawyers vigilling day and night and ready to pounce as someone uploads child porn in your instance lol.
Not a surprise though, someone with passion for computers is an anxiety-ridden thingy
This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.
I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don’t really have much choice in this matter considering there’s no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they’d likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing
The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the “problem” is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.
But obviously that’s too much work and it’s easier to just be a crybaby.
Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.
I feel this is the fatal flaw of the lemmyverse. Before I heard about lemmy I was building my own similar system where you would subscribe to servers/instances specifically, without any cross instance caching. That way you will only see what you want to see, and if an instance gets overloaded they have to scale up, but won’t bring down your whole browsing in the meantime. It would be up to the client apps to aggregate all your instances/feeds to show you a list to doomscroll through, but you would have one account (activity pub compatible) to subscribe to them all with. If there were private, invite only communities for piracy then it wouldn’t legally jeopardize the rest of them either. I keep chipping away at it. One day I’ll publish is.
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Edit: Didn’t mean to ridicule any of you all. I based my comment on my experience when I signed up. At that time there were plenty of instances to pick from and getting approved at my instance of choice was very quick. My bad.
One benefit the Fediverse has over a centralized site is that, as long as you set the same display name and avatar, most people will recognize you after a migration. For example, I know a few fellow Lemmygrad guys who have alternate, identical Lemmy.ml accounts for posting on instances that block Lemmygrad, and you can’t even tell which account they’re using unless you visit their page.
It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn’t stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can’t police beyond blocking the community / instance.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
To give credit where it’s due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.
Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
its not a bug, its a feature! the faceless admins get to tell you watch content you can get now, not a faceless corporations! its so good that all the instances are starting a war with each other over the content they host because it means we have the choice of who gets to decide what content we like to see!.
I can sense the sarcasm of your post, yet the words you’ve written are actually true. This is exactly what decentralisation is all about. on some other websites you might lose access to the content entirely, on the fediverse you can just go there direct and still get all of the content, nobody can ever take that away from you except for the people who manage that content.
That’s literally the main selling point of this kind of setup. Nobody, faceless or otherwise, can stop you accessing any of the content.
I went with lemmy world so i could catch the widest net in content. And up till now i agreed with the reasoning of the other defederating.s But it seems like it won’t take much to provoke more restrictions. Guess i will have to lurk in other shores.
I don’t remember where it was for me, but I do remember it being the hop-on point for me into Lemmy because it was already well populated, so I figured it meant “good”. Now that I understand lemmy better, I’ve realized I don’t need to patron it anymore - there are better instances for me. I suspect that this is a good thing that something is causing users to move. I’m sure .world is the face of fediverse, or at least lemmy, for many at this point and will continue to grow in user base. Maybe losing users on the back end will satisfy the DDOS attackers, and also lighten the load while .world’s admin get it figured out.
on the mastodon side at least quite a few people started off on mastodon.social and migrated over to smaller instances (or in some cases migrated to entirely different software families like pleroma or misskey)
i’d go as far as to say (jokingly ofc) that you aren’t a true member of the fediverse if you didn’t migrate at least once
It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc. Just head over to one ones that’s hosting the content, or check out others to see if they will keep federated with the pirate communities. Make the same username, and most won’t even know that you’re posting from a different instance. You can still see everything you did before, just also possibly some other stuff. You might also get beehaw and hexbear (for better or for worse is up to you)! I feel like I might hop instances a few more times before I settle.
Okay, you’re not on Reddit anymore where things are just easy because they spent time to figure it out. Fediverse is just a fledging group of sites that are getting an influx of users, while still trying to figure out both their instance, and cooperative rules that fit both their values and the wants/needs of their users. You want a well oiled machine, jump back into the mainstream where they use your data to personalize the adds they place between all the things you want to see. Or, you can go with the flow as this new ecosystem forms, sans ads, and free of data collection.
I highly recommend opening a lurking account in one of the NSFW instances. They are probably some of the fastest, most progressive and best funded instances on Lemmy. You do not have to browse the NSFW content.
I don’t think that makes sense if you’re worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can’t interact with large communities).
It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
Yeah, it really can’t be helped. The piracy community can always just shut down and congregate elsewhere. It’s significantly harder for a more general community to scatter and reform.
This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
Recently Nintendo closed a lawsuit where the person in question is basically doomed to a lifetime of financial ruin. He was to spend 3 years in prison but was released and owes Nintendo $10 million. Nintendo, the poor indie company, is now entitled to 25% up to 30% of his income for the rest of his life. Gary Bowser Vs. Nintendo.
In 2018, someone maintaining a ROM site was ordered to pay Nintendo $12 million.
In late 2021, someone was sentenced to 10 years of prison and to pay Nintendo $14.5 million. That person got out on good behavior last April, but 25-30% of their wages are going to be garnished until their debt to Nintendo is paid off - which will likely take the rest of their life.
Sued him (so far nothing irregular) and he has to pay 10 million dollars or something along this magnitude. Bottom line is, he will have to give a good portion of his income for the rest of his life to Nintendo. OK, that guy was kinda stupid and monetized the website through ads but the punishment is still super excessive for something that resulted in no bodily harm for anyone. Meanwhile, the ROM site could be googled and yet Google is still free to allow users to find pirated media. YouTube started as a video piracy platform (not officially, of course, but unlicensed uploads of popular videos were the reason YouTube grew so much). LW admins will not be granted the same luxury.
Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?
Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t look up the exact details before writing because the overall point remains that courts punish individuals exceptionally hard for copyright offenses.
I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you're going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it's an unfair battle from the start.
I can't blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There's a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it's protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.
Why would the user be able to sue? Unless they thought their work was being infringed (in which case why they wouldn’t send a dmca?) I don’t see what possible standing they’d have.
Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
EDIT: The post in question in case others haven’t seen it lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
Understandable reason but there is not one illegally shared file in these communities. What’s next, watching a John Wick movie makes me a murderer now?
That’s just lemmy.world servers having their usual issues loading. Though it is kind of amusing, a lemmy.world user going to lemm.ee to view a lemmy.world post, federation is funny that way :P
They should have asked them to change their rules instead. Sharing DL links can get the admin in trouble. LueLinks had to do away with it at one point too, and they were primo pirate site back in the day. I think reddit had r/piracy and other subs change their rules - the one that had links to mushroom spore sellers (forgot the name) had to stop sharing links to sellers that sold magic mushroom spores (not an illegal thing to do). It’s tough, but admin made guiding rules, and that breaks one of them. Plus, if it’s on their server, it could be admins head on the chopping block.
If you are hosting a discussion forum on a server that you are responsible for, does that automatically make you responsible for the content that people post on it? Even an instance the size of dbzer0 is impossible for a single person to moderate all of the content from the many communities that are federated with it. Impossible.
That’s like saying the admin of lemmy.world holds all of the wild political opinions that are posted on there.
When feds come a knockin’? Fuck yeah it does mean you’re responsible for them, yeah man. Lmao. We just had our server admin purge some pervert agenda pusher. Because first off thats fucked up and next it could have the server seized.
Some dusty law enforcement won’t care if its just one bad apple. Especially if they get whiff that its a “community”.
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me tbh. If you are harboring communities of sexual abusers or something, sure.
Here’s another example: I have some pretty fucked up fiction books in my house. Am I responsible for what the author says? It’s the same damn thing. Words written by a person who is not me, that are in my house.
When it comes to the legality of most things hosted on websites, that is how it works. The legality of piracy is different, for no reason.
Too many people in this thread are basically saying “discussing/assisting with piracy is illegal, move on” while having no opinion whatsoever on whether or not that is a just law. They just base their morality on what is legal and I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SAY WHY THAT CAN BE PROBLEMATIC.
I disagree that it doesn’t matter, even if it is less relevant to lemmy.world’s course of action.
many people in this thread are making moral arguments against piracy, and most of the people doing so are just appealing to the authority of the law.
but if you really want to have a discussion about the risk to lemmy.world, there wasn’t any yet. the piracy community also disallowed sharing direct links to files, and even in the event that lemmy.world had received a DMCA, that would have been the moment to do something about it, they aren’t liable for just hosting content unless they ignore one of those. acting like they are going to get singled out and have the servers shut down and raided because they might have a cache of some person’s comments from a different website where someone might have posted direct links to illegal files is a massive overreaction. This whole thing was set off by a troll that was mad that they got banned from lemmy.dbzer0.com for being transphobic and tried to tattle on the group like a toddler, not because of any implication that the risks were about to change.
not that anyone but the admin’s opinions matter in this case, it is their server. they could do anything at all and it wouldn’t matter to me regardless of it’s legality or risk. Doesn’t change that I’m not fan of large corporations or the people that bend over backwards for them, out of fear or any reason.
I mean if you support illegally hosted material you can be forced to take down the website. As much as it sucks, piracy is illegal. Anyways, they haven’t defederated, just blocked that community.
Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
Basically they blocked the communities but not the instances they were hosted on, so people on lemmy.world can still interact with posts and comments made by people like me
It’s not censorship, it’s just smart people protecting themselves from liability. Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
But aren’t they protected under the same laws that other sites like Reddit are already protected under?
As far as being responsible for what their users post, last I heard that already had laws that protected the sites that hosted them so they were not responsible.
Legal / illegal is the wrong term here because this type of thing is a civil matter.
If you were a volunteer admin and receive a cease and desist notice from an expensive law firm with an army of lawyers representing a client with infinite money, what would you do?
Would you pay your own lawyers out of your own pocket to stand up for your freedoms and rights, or would you just roll over and let someone else take up that fight? Would definitely be the latter for me.
That may be true, but it’s easy to say that as a third party who is not receiving threats of litigation.
Well I’m not saying it out of ignorance as a third party, I’ve actually read articles going all the way back to the time of BBS sites, where US laws protect those who host these sites from being responsible for the comments that people make that sit on their servers.
I don’t remember the exact law name right now (IANAL) but I know it exists, I’ve read articles about it before.
Even if you’re 100% confident that you will ultimately be found blameless, most people would take action to avoid facing a civil suit.
A well resourced opponent will drag you to consultation. Even forcing you to respond to a legal demand is an arduous task. You might grind through it and even get awarded costs, but you’d have to bear those costs while you’re going through the process.
Point is, they can still destroy your resolve without winning a case.
Even forcing you to respond to a legal demand is an arduous task.
You’re over exaggerating the effort required to initially defend yourself against something like this.
Plus the safe harbor laws are very defined, so a judge would most likely throw the case out of court early on, if it even ever got that far. The safe harbor laws as I understand them are very clear on this.
You’re overexaggerating the desire for volunteers invest any effort whatsoever in defending themselves against a sophisticated and well resourced civil lawsuit.
You’re overexaggerating the desire for volunteers invest any effort whatsoever
Now that’s hyperbole.
And again, while I am not a lawyer, my understanding is the law is very specific and very clear on this matter. Companies that host sites that people put comments on (as long as they follow the hosting requirements of the law) are immune from prosecution. Safe harbors.
Lemmy.world is hosted on a german Server and afaik run by german people. Hosting or even just linking to anything piracy related in germany would be suicide.
My bad. I was sure i read somewhere they are hosted in germany. guess i was wrong. Still, hosting or linking to illegal stuff inside the EU is probably still a very bad idea. apart from it violating the ToS of the hoster (Hetzner).
The only thing it’s serious about is being a decentralized platform - if you want to access something, then choose an instance who’se admins are serious about being heavily censored.
It’s the old adage of “if you don’t like something, do something about it”
The fediverse gives you the tools and ability to surf the fediverse how you want, all through decentralization. Don’t like the rules on one instance? Move, simple as that.
It’s the same context of “vote with your wallet” - only put your accounts and time into instances you want to put your account on and only donate to instances you want to donate to, vote with your time and money, that’s how we can make this platform better, for ourselves and for others.
Are you a lawyer? Would you happen to know to what extent the owners of lemmy.world are liable in any nation for their role in helping people pirate material? Im willing to bet this is about liability.
Unless the users themselves are directly posting links to the content and hosting it (the pirated content) on lemmy, no instance would be held liable. Anyone defending this has no idea what the fuck they are talking about.
That’s a bit naive, knowing what we know about the sharks that run the large media corporations. For your average instance owner, it’s not a question of being found not liable, it’s the fact that you as an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and an ordinary income suddenly have to defend yourself legally with all the exposure and expense that entails, from day one.
I don’t know about you but engaging a lawyer and going to court to defend myself would be a massive financial drain. And to risk that on simply the hope that a court might find in my favour is far too big of a risk. Then add on all the unwanted public exposure, the internet notoriety etc. Fuck that.
What’s the fucking point. The community isn’t even hosted on lemmy.world. I don’t want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.
Maybe you can host your own private instance and smirk as you block everybody while the rest of us communicate.
This nonstop suggestion of “hOst yOuR oWn iNstAnCe” is rarely a good solution. They already know it’s an option. You never provide anything when you say it, except to display your own smug smirk as you tell your fellow lemurian to get lost.
And they don’t provide anything by whining about having to make accounts on different instances and saying Lemmy is DOOOOOOMED because of it. It’s the nature of the fediverse, deal with it or make your own instance.
We will deal with it by raising concerns among our peers, even as you callously tell us to leave. You make your own instance and leave others to communicate openly without your ugliness.
People can talk about piracy all they want here it seems. It’s when folks start giving very direct advice about how and where to do stuff that things turn into a legal grey area for websites. It also helps to not blow up a great source by sharing it all over the internet for the feds and ignorant people to easily find.
I’ve been on the internet for a long time. Back in my day, we just referred to the where as “the usual places.” Seems that’s not the norm anymore.
Devil’s advocate, all content is replicated onto federated instances, the admins of Lemmy.world may be afraid of legal repercussions in their country for technically hosting such content. Personally, I don’t think merely discussing piracy will get them in trouble, but their instance, their call.
But that’s the beauty of the Fediverse, you just migrate your account to another instance that isn’t afraid of repercussions or doesn’t have repercussions in their hosting country. There are a few easy to use migration tools out there.
That’s not the beauty of the fediverse; it’s its greatest weakness. The federation, defederation, blocking of communities and words (world even had a word filter smh) depending on what server you have an account on - this is the shit why the fediverse doesn’t have a chance to get to critical mass. It will never be more than a niche thing on the side.
No, making hundred accounts on hundreds of instances is not a workable solution.
I think that many users on here are clearly biased and will make arguments defending this aspect of the Fediverse because the users of the Fediverse likely skew on the “techy” side of things. Many times, when I see critiques of this platform that hold it back from being more accessible, I often see replies with some variation of “good, if it’s too easy then we’ll get those people”.
I think it’s an arrogant attitude that stems from a pointless sense of elitism over people who don’t have the same perceived level of technical skills. There are small, non tech and non political communities on the fediverse that will struggle to grow because of how unapproachable the Fediverse is and because of the gatekeeping that awaits them.
People visit content aggregators for two primary reasons: 1. Curated and personalized content delivery and 2. Social engagement. For both of those to work, you need people to continuously interact with the platform. That means you need users and you want them to be engaged. If it becomes difficult for people to get the platform to deliver on reason 1 and reason 2, people will lose motivation to engage. And no, people will not care if they can “easily” create a new account on another server to visit an instance that is now blocked because an admin of the server they joined (which, for most new users, is probably whichever they are presented with first) decides to take it upon themselves to make some big moral statement.
Personally, I don’t defend the Fediverse. I think it’s still too complicated to reach critical mass. I would like to see an SSO-style sign in where an instance can orchestrate a sign-in with another instance, so you can use your account anywhere.
I hate elitism, it has been a plight on the Linux community for years. I want the Fediverse and Lemmy to reach critical mass. I want the average Joe to be able to enjoy the Fediverse without having to become tech savvy.
It’s to be expected in this transitional time and period away from corporate social media, towards federated. It sucks, but it’s really not the end of the world. Cool your jets, salty
No need to stop using LW. I’ve got three accounts on different instances plus kbin. Oh, and I fifth on if you count my nsfw login. Partitioning your online life is nbd, really. And the fediverse makes it easy.
Sopuli was my original instance from before I knew what the Fediverse was but however they have their server set federated community discovery has been broken from the beginning. World is my reddit migration account and I moderate a couple of communities there. I really like some of the communities on Beehaw, and they defederated pretty quickly from just about anyone with more than a few users, so I got an account there. Kbin didn’t seem to work as well cross-federation so…number 4. And I use a different handle for NSFW. It would be nice to have an app for aggregating usernames across instances, but I much of my browsing from desktop so it’s really nbd.
Given lemmy.world’s uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I’d be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao
I’m late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin’s decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people’s idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It’s totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say “thank you for hosting us” and move on if it’s not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.
Greed … it’s the cause of all these issues. Greed on the part of the corporations and industries that run these services and own all this content.
If they just tempered their greed, lowered their costs, paid themselves less, shared profits with those who actually deserve it and made all of it more affordable and even cheap for customers … no one would think of piracy and we would all just feel comfortable paying for services and content knowing that the money we did spend was being shared fairly.
Instead when we all know that the profits they make just go towards corporate greed, giving away money to shareholders who do nothing and give little to no money to the actual content creators while artificially inflating costs on all of us just to squeeze more out of everyone … those of us at the bottom really don’t mind pirating content because we know that the only people we are stealing from are the greedy idiots that instead feel that it’s normal for them to steal from us.
Everyone pirates everyone else … it’s a matter of economics … either we pirate them … or they pirate us. If we all live with an understanding, we learn to live in balance without pirating one another.
Right now the they’re tilting the balance against us … which is why so many feel obligated to raise the Jolly Roger once again.
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