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.

[–] OverfedRaccoon@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm not sure why some people assume it's a problem. I've had a few accounts now. I went kbin to Beehaw (liked Lemmy more overall) to LemmyWorld to Lemmee (initially as an alt). Now Lemmee is the main. And if that goes sideways, well, I've got at least 3 other instances I've got my eye on as potentials. That's the beauty of the Fediverse.

[–] sab@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with your reasoning is that these communities aren't providing/hosting any illegal content. Furthermore, "legal" where? US law doesn't apply outside of the US and vice versa.

[–] sab@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don't.

The fediverse doesn't need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn't be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter "e" is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).

Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it's fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It's simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.

If you don't like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It's literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.

[–] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It isn't pedantry as there aren't discussions of illegal content occurring either. If I talk about torrents (not illegal) I'm not breaking the law or discussing anything illegal. Neither is a discussion about Qbittorrent or Jellyfin. Neither is a discussion about the hardware needed to seed 1000 different Linux ISOs. Don't let your ignorance of the topic blind you.

Can you point to the illegality of this post? https://beehaw.org/post/7156567

Do you agree that !gaming@beehaw.org should also be defederated now for posting illegal content?

Also, I am already using a different instance if that wasn't obvious enough.

[–] Gork@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Hmm I shall possibly join that community to boycott this symbol, too.

[–] 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.

[–] bioemerl@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

The beauty of all of this is that I can just switch to an instance that doesn't defederate or is very prone to not do so. So far kbin has been very good and doesn't defederate much, which is awesome

[–] darreninthenet@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Would be nice if there was a way or an app that ties together all those individual accounts into a single view.