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:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

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.

We've launced a public discord server at https://discord.gg/lemmyworld

The reason for why we choose discord is because it was easier to moderate and manage than other options. Besides we also had a discord-bot guru by the name of Rooki who created a neat bot that allowed us to connect/verify discord users to their Lemmy World account.

So if you are a moderator and you are looking for some extra hands to moderate your community, or if you need to contact anyone from the LW team, this is the most efficient way to do it!

Come have a look!

I'm helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because "Linux can't play games" despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.

2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can't even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.

Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.

EDIT: no, I don't sympathize with nazis (neither I sympathize with those who call everyone nazi when they're losing an argument ;)

Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.

Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

• As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
• Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
• Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
• In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

• Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
• Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.

Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

• lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
• Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

• The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
• Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
• We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

• There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
• There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

"b-but bears are actually dangerous!" Shut the hell up.

luckily this is just a 32; i had a 70 from the same brand with the same INSANELY FUCKING STUPID STAND DESIGN that i had to find something for....literally at the most extreme edges of the thing, what the fuck is this? this is so fucking stupid, it cannot be meaningfully cheaper than a proper design and it looks fucking dumb as hell and surely this has pissed off 90% of people that wanted a TV and want to put it on a little stand like a normal fucking person right??

Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.

Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.

If you're a server admin, please defederate Meta's domain "threads.net"

If you don't run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate "threads.net".