Removal of piracy communities

Hello world!

Some of you will already have noticed that we have removed some piracy related communities from Lemmy.World during the last day.

Lack of communication

First off, we want to address the lack of communication.

Not everyone in our current admin team has been with us long enough to be aware of the previous issues and discussions related to these communities and the impact this has on our community.

We should absolutely have published this announcement when or before we removed the communities, not hours later. After realizing this mistake, we would have liked to write this a lot earlier already, but we were all busy with irl things, that we just didn’t have time for it.

Lemmy.World is run by volunteers on their personal time, nobody here gets paid for what we do.

Removed communities

Next, we want to explain how we got to the decision to remove these communities.

!crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com

A lot of the recent content posted to this community included images instructing users to visit a specific website to obtain a copy of the release that the post is about. These instructions were in the form of Type in Google: visit-this.domain. The domain referenced in these posts is entirely focused on video game piracy and providing people with access to copyright infringing material.

While there may be legal differences between whether one is linking to specific content on a domain or just linking to the domain itself, such as linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy compared to linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/, we do not consider this to be clear enough in laws and previous lawsuits that linking to just the domain is acceptable, if that domain is primarily about distributing copyright infringing material. We therefore do not allow linking to such domains. Additionally, we do not see a significant difference between posting a link directly to a website and embedding said link in an image, so we treat them equally.

!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

This community is, for the most part, just about discussing various topics related to piracy. We do not at all mind discussion about this topic, and if it had been limited to that, this community would be fine.

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is willing to accept this content on their instance, as well as the potential legal risk coming from this, which they’re free to do.

We do not plan to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com, is a great person, and we have no problems with him as a person. This is just a matter of different risk tolerance.

!piracy@lemmy.ml

Same as !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

Why have the piracy communities been restored previously? What changed?

Currently, based on the memories of team members involved in the decision back then, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the community moderators and Lemmy.World admins in how the community will be moderated going forward, as well as which types of content are allowed.

Lemmy.World expected/assumed that links to websites primarily focused on facilitating distribution of pirated content would be disallowed in these communities.

The community moderators however do tolerate references to such websites, as long as people are not linking to individual content directly.

We suspect that this may have been missed during our original review when restoring the communities, which lead us to previously restoring these communities.

Why now?

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

Terms of Service clarification

Last, as we’ve reviewed our Terms of Service, we have updated our wording here to make it more clear what is and what isn’t allowed when it comes to piracy. This was already covered by "Do not post illegal content of any type. Do not engage in any activity that may […] facilitate or provide access to illegal transactions" in section 4, but we have now added section 4.1 to better explain this.

We apologize for the delays in communication.

Currently we have an images issue. Our Wasabi (S3) account was disabled because of some illegal content that was found, we're working with them to get the account re-enabled and the content removed.

[Update 20240308 14:47 UTC] The issue has been fixed.

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)

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Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal <3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@LemmyWorld@mastodon.world) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN & Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.

See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711

While we value our users' right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

Dear Lemmy.world Community,

Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I'm reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I'm sure you can probably guess what we've had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I'll add the thing we're talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don't know.

Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.

The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn't apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.

This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it's relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.

We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.

Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Sincerely,

The Lemmy.world Administration

Legal / ToS

::: spoiler spoiler CSAM

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:::

Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I'm sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

Hello World!

We want to wish you all a great new year! We also want to look back on 2023 and the amazing things that have happened here on Lemmy.World and the rest of the Lemmyverse.

We couldn’t have begun to dream of the amazing community we have built here. The self-destruction that has been happening on Reddit has been the opportunity of a lifetime to create an amazing community here. We hope everyone who migrated over has found a great place to share, scroll and upvote here on Lemmy.

The numbers have been amazing:

• Almost 150k accounts here on Lemmy.World
• 212k posts and 1.66 million comments
• Almost 10k communities

We think next year will be even better! You can help us achieve that by simply being yourself and posting as much as you want. A special thanks to all the moderators that have kept the communities rolling. Don’t hesitate to thank them for their contributions.

Our donors allow Lemmy.World to stay truly free and accessible for everyone! Thank you to every single one of them. Also thank you to everyone who donated to the team that created Lemmy itself, funding the development of this platform with huge potential.

We hope 2024 will be great for everyone! Thank you for being such an amazing community.

~ The admin and community teams

Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!

You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.

Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗

Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.