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.
Until accounts can be migrated or users are disconnected from the instances, this will be a huge limit of Lemmy over other social media. Having to maintain multiple accounts on the same platform simply to view all the content you want will deter users.
Having multiple accounts is a core part of lemmy and is why it’s so integrated into the apps and quick to access. People just are used to a single (commercial)entity controlling everything for them that they are having a hard time realizing they need to control it themselves. I agree it would be nice to link accounts in a more seamless way so they are less tied to instances but that is not a huge price to pay imho.
