This is a bad move that's anti-community and user-hostile. Hopefully it also fucks over the monopoly they've been trying to get over communities. People need to stop defaulting to putting their communities under .world jurisdiction and use other, smaller, and more relevant instances instead.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
185 points (86.9% liked)
Fediverse
17724 readers
2 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The link you posted is a post by a mod announcing that they will enforce the policy given to them by the LW admins.
From the modlog I can tell that (presumably) you posted a text post to [email protected] about the policy that was then removed.
If you're posting to [email protected], such posts would obviously be removed because that's A. not on topic (that'd be a topic for [email protected]. ) and B. not a link to an article. The latter is also the reason given for the removal.
Stirring up drama over absolutely nothing usually ends up hurting someone. Could you not?
Do not under estimate the copyright mafia. The pirate bay admins spent time in jail (and didn't host anything).
Hosting copyright infringement is taken seriously, including civil damage which would definitely bankrupt a non profit organization. But it could result in jail time if the administrators don't take action.
A small team like LW (or any Lemmy instance) doesn't have a team of lawyers dealing with that shit. Please be kind with your admin and follow the laws, even the ones which suck
This is total BS and people are upvoting it just because it sounds truthy.
Piracy links? Yeah, sure.
Archive links? Like OP said, even corporate Reddit allows those. The risk to a Lemmy instance from allowing this is literally zero. There is a rule of lawsuits among lawyers that you always look for the deep pockets because you can't get anything from a lawsuit if the defendant can't pay. There is no way Lemmy.world would be sued for this before Reddit, which actually has money to pay with. That's even setting aside the notion that linking to archives could be found to constitute copyright infringement.
Not that I agree that removing/banning archive links is sensible, but reddit has a much bigger budget for lawyers than any instance admin, so is in a much safer position with grey-area and black-area-but-no-one-complained-yet content. It's not like reddit was ever particularly anti-piracy, either - the corporate interests they bowed to were advertisers and their shareholders.
They won’t waste time on lemmy over this. They’ll send cease and desist letters if they care enough. Ignoring those would lead to a suit, but assuming people are immediately going to be dragged into court over the actions being discussed here is on the farfetched side. Even those lawyers and paralegals on retainer have a cost per man hour, so dealing with finding out who a Lemmy instance operator is and drafting the legalese is going to have to be a worthwhile effort for them over some article links.
Even if you are 100% in the right the billion dollar companies can bury you in legal fees until you run out of money.
If I had to guess, they're probably not doing it just because they want to. It's entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation. Or they're afraid that they could face litigation if they don't take action.
We shouldn't assume ill intent unless there's something to substantiate it.
If that's the case, then they should be open and honest about it. We're back where we were before with the one-sided, spurious, and uncommunicated defederation decisions.
They should've explained that in the post if that was the case. Not make a pinned post that's locked with zero information. Also it would be a frivolous threat considering no website has ever had to remove internet archive links. If they want to threaten someone they have to threaten the Internet Archive not a tiny website like lemmy.world that is protected by section 230 and doesnt host any copyrighted material.
Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland. 230 is not applicable.
It’s entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation.
I kinda get posting the entire article in the post body but not linking to archives. Publications should then litigate against those archives if they think that archiving is illegal. It's not like archiving services operate "in the shadows" or anything like that.
They probably got a YMCA request or whatever that's called 😉
Surely if that were the case they would let their user know right? If you aren't open about the reasons, you are shit and should be defederated by everyone immediately.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is the inevitable consequence of being the largest instance, you get the most scrutiny from copyright trolls.
From lemmy.world's inception (and before), I along with many other Lemmy users have sang the chorus of: if you don't like an instance's policies, you can leave and join a separate instance!
That's the whole point of a federated, de-centralized model.
A policy is built by informed consent. There has to be a process and a reasoning and human hands who can be held accountable when things aren't done right. I don't think any Fedi instances are doing "policy" by that definition. And that's entirely because they don't want their users/trolls to use/game the system, I believe.
To strengthen the power of the Fediverse, more self-hosted instances is the way.
My take is they are less defenders of copyright and are rather less interested in bearing the brunt of an infringement lawsuit caused by people posting content they do not have rights to.
Rule 1: "Do not post entire articles or archive links to copyrighted articles"
Also lemmy.world when creating a post: "Why not use one of these archive shortcuts?"
That's built into lemmy itself. If they want to be drastic about it they could fork it out I guess.
That’s built into lemmy itself. If they want to be drastic about it they could fork it out I guess.
Instances running slightly patched versions of Lemmy is nothing uncommon.
They could even just hide it with CSS
Lemmy.world has a storied history of being a shit instance. Go ahead & leave ASAP
It's a real pity. Some of us use the archive links because modern websites ignore accessibility guidelines and create hostile UX. So many popups and animations and autoplay videos with sound.
While I understand their motives, the result is a move towards an internet that excludes people further
Someone's attempting to capitalize on federation...
Fuck them. I’ll continue to post the full article if someone asks for a paywall bypass. Information should be free.
I don't agree with their decision, and I hope some transparency is forthcoming about what led to them taking such an extreme position. OTOH, I'm also not going to tell them how to run their instance.
Your post in the politics community did merit removal as it violated the rules. I don't think that community allows "meta" posts unless it's from a mod (I could be wrong).
Their admins are usually pretty transparent, so, again, hopefully more information will be presented.
In the mean time, just look for off-instance crossposts ;)
Transparency should be preceding or in parallel, not an afterthought. This is not acceptable.
Are you owed transparency regarding something you use but do not have any responsibility for? That sounds incredibly entitled to me.
It's about trust, bucko.
That's just your sense of entitlement talking.
🙄
lmao. Defederate immediately, just on principal. Let Lemmy.world know that once they stop being capitalist stoogies they can reapply for federation.
This will not go the way you think it will.
They've updated their 'policy', still with no accrual explanation that I can see:
The admin team updated the communities that they will allow archive links to be used.
Wow, am I glad I decided to self host.