A shroom community was removed from lemmy.world as it was considered "illegal" content by the admins. The logic behind this is boggling, to say the least.
Marijuana is considered an illegal substance in some states in the US and is still federally illegal. /c/trees should be banned, correct?
Clown pictures of Putin are absolutely considered illegal in Russia, so that should require and immediate ban.
Freedom of speech can also be considered illegal in some places.
Incest is considered illegal so that should automatically trigger a ban on all incest porn, real or not. Hell, porn is universally taboo, so that shouldn't have any place on this instance, I guess.
You see where I am going with this? Rule 1 is a catch-all and needs clarification. Simply saying something is illegal is not quite enough. Owning and sharing pictures of shrooms is not illegal. Trading spores or mycelium is generally not illegal either.
This is not about me being salty (which I am) about the community being removed and forced to relocate. It's the odd bias that was applied to justify its removal.
Please note that I said fix Rule 1, not remove it. There are some really bad things on the internet that shouldn't use lemmy as a safe haven.
Y'all could set up on psychedelia.ink instead: "A Lemmy instance for all things psychedelia or psychedelia-adjacent."
There may be other appropriate specialized instances as well, that was just the first one that I noticed.
This is the solution. Communities need to congregate on smaller, like-minded instances. It makes sense to concentrate users on large instances, but communities should be spread out.
That's what blocking a community is - if the instance does not allow anyone to subscribe to a community, the content from that community will not be mirrored locally.
The indirect approach you describe isn't compatible with the underlying ActivityPub protocol. My understanding is that all communities are effectively local, even when their home is on a different instance. Federation just allows modification of the "local" content by another instance.
(That is not to say that [email protected] is the same community as [email protected], rather that the two communities are accessed in the same way by the UI)
If the content is hyperlinks / torrent links to copyrighted content, then even a read-only copy is illegal. Lemmy (by virtue of ActivityPub) isn't designed to access stuff remotely - the closest it could probably come would be to have links to the posts on the remote community, though adding a level of indirection is probably not enough to become legal.
If you want to do illegal stuff on the internet, you need to use services that are hosted where it isn't illegal. People yelling about freedom doesn't change the fact that admins aren't willing to go to jail for your warez.
This is my leaning.
Y'all gotta stop that whining and really lean into the "Blackjacks and Hookers" solution.
Yeah, this is why I like topic-specialized instances:
We need to think of what we're doing here less as recreating reddit, and more as linking together all those old phpBB-style enthusiast forums.
That's an excellent way to think about it! Especially with links between forums taking you to the other site, and a lack of account sharing, this isn't a distributed Reddit. Trying to make Lemmy into that causes all sorts of issues-- What instance do I search on to find [insert community here]? Where should I make my account? Even stuff like every community or user gravitating towards a few large instances. Each instance should be meaningfully distinct, with a set of communities related to a particular topic. This works best with the infrastructure and I feel like it would help solidify the culture as well. It would really help out the Local communities option too. Your choice of instance(s) should be meaningful, not meaningless.