this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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So, this community isn't hosted on lemmy.world because they don't what that on their servers. Fine. But now they're censoring what I can see?! Are we okay with this?
It's their instance, their rules. You can join another instance that doesn't defederate from them or make your own. That's the beauty of the fediverse design. It doesn't matter if we're okay with it, we have options to get around it unlike with centralized platforms.
This is kind of my point. lemmy.world doesn't like what this community is doing so it's not hosted on their server. I get and respect that.
What I don't understand is the rationality behind blocking this specific community. It's someone somewhere deciding what I can or can't see on a remote host they have no control over.
I mean, they do have control over it in a sense. They can defederate from it so it's no longer on their instance, which they did. You can still access the community from other instances though, like you're doing now, so it's not really a big deal. This is how federation is meant to function. People running their instances by their own rules.
I agree though, their rationale for defederation from this community does not add up for me either. But at the end of the day they can be as irrational as they want with their instance.
Yeah, we're basically on the same page here. Their instance, their rules.
I'm hopeful that in the future, accounts will be "in the fediverse", and end users can choose what they want to see or not see. Then it's on the instance that's hosting the community to determine what's okay to host or not.
How would you want to handle authentication? The user stores their own keyring, like Nostr?
Never heard of Nostr.
PKI? GPG? Private key shows you own the account. All instances keep a copy of your public key. You go direct to the instance to get the content. When you want to post you sign your message and send it along.
I'm sure smarter people then me have considered this and more so I'm not sure what's possible.
Eh, I get both sides of the argument. They’re not deciding what you can or can’t see, they’re deciding what you can or can’t see while using their resources. Personally, that type of censorship would lead me to be looking for another instance, but I also get where they’re coming from. Kinda.
I get where they’re coming from too. I guess they just want to avoid any potential issues. That being said, the recent piracy issue reddit faced where companies tried to get reddit to reveal some users’ IPs for saying they torrented a movie is a good example that talking about piracy is not inherently illegal, as long as they weren’t actually sharing the files on the site.
A possible solution is continue federation but not allow caching and have users browse content from the community directly, so there’s no liability of having the content on .world servers. That’s resource intensive and might need major lemmy code changes though.
Also, as others mentioned, it seems this was started by a troll who was being petty and claimed the community is rule-breaking, and the admins were easily spooked.
As a user of lemmy.ca, this won't affect you directly.
I understand that but it affects the community and lemmy fediverse
Dude I understand where you coming from but no admins wants to deal with legal shit when they pay for infrastructure and some donation. I understand completely why they're defederating so guys like you and me should stfu and use their free stuff that we got without being tracked by big tech and getting our data harvested.
I get "in the real world" is different but lemmy.world shouldn't be held responsible for what another instance or their users are doing.
Where is the line drawn? I buy a harddrive to store movies, use my ISP to download it, power company to run the PC. Should we sue them also? Should they try and censor what I do? WD sees a movie on my disk, should they delete it?
The way lemmy is programmed is kinda ghettoz youre not getting it straight from another instance - first the request gets saved on lemmy.world, then send to you from its cache.
The saving of this cache puts them at rist of hosting copyrighted material (even if copyright is bullshit)
I don't see how that risk is any greater than any mailing list potentially forwarding copyrighted material.
As long as the instance would comply with any relevant DMCA request, it seems unlikely that legal action could be taken against them.
I see what you're saying, and I wish that was the case. To play devil's advocate here though, at least your ISP and WD have a legal team (at least I'd assume) to deal with frivolous lawsuits - most Lemmy admins however do not.
WD also can't feasibly remove the content from your drive (yet?), that would be easy to prove to any judge. That is not the case for instance admins where it'd be easy for anyone to testify that there is indeed a "Purge/Block Community" button available for instance admins.
Yeah, and my ISP has been legally told to block all Access to IPTV and do so. Why this happens I don't understand (or agree with). Going after the source is the only one true way to stop access.
Cloudflare is a popular service for public torrent sites because they cache the content, protect from DDOS, and hide the server address. They're not on the hook for what their customers do.
Agreed! If I had to take a guess, its a Risk vs Reward game so-to-speak. Your ISP doesn't really have anything to lose by complying, but Cloudflare's whole business revolves around reputation (something most ISPs clearly don't care about unfortunately) along with being a massive CDN. To them, the risk of having their reputation sullied by someone going "I don't like this" and taking down a potentially paying customer's site makes it worthwhile fighting the legal battles that could come out of not complying with a takedown request.
Just guessing of course, but it would somewhat make sense.