Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:
We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.
This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
I 100% agree with your assessment regarding relative level of risk. On the other hand, knowing LW is hosted in Finland by a German provider does multiply their risk solely by virtue of geography.
Very few instances have proper resources for general moderation never mind sorting out the “hard questions”.
The troll that started this shitshow knew exactly what they were doing. Once the admins were “alerted” they had to act in order maintain “safe harbor” provisions afforded to communications carriers and platforms. While I’m most familiar with the US DCMA, similar legislation and provisions exist in the EU and other locales. Problem is, remote community moderation is somewhat hit or miss right now due to shortcomings in the platform itself. That’s if you even have the resources to look through everything and make a “reasonable” determination on a post by post or comment by comment basis. While I don’t agree with the decision to block these communities I do see how the admins may have reached the conclusion that to do so was their only viable choice, at the moment.