cerevant

Nature knows how to solve this problem.

I suppose it could still be done as a read-only display of content ...

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.

You are allowed to discuss piracy. You aren’t allowed to facilitate piracy (I.e. providing links to pirated content). It is illegal in the country where this instance is hosted.

This isn’t about the values or opinions of the admins, this is about legal exposure. Users don’t get a vote in the risks admins are willing to take.

Is there a place for something in between de-federated and federated?

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.

Is there not some kind of 'gray-list' that would allow risky content to stay accessible through home instances but behave more as a direct link

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)

Defederating cuts off the whole instance. They just blocked those three piracy communities as far as I understand.

Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.

A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can't police beyond blocking the community / instance.

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.

Not really - it isn’t prediction, it is early detection. Interpretive AI (finding and interpreting patterns) is way ahead of generative AI.

T&C / license agreements need to have standardized, government approved language that can have a nutrition label type summary. This would not only be good for consumers, but good for businesses- Business seem to blunder into these PR fiascos when their lawyers go overboard with the CYA language.

We just got the bot promoted to mod, so the timing is off - this happened because the bot got started late. It isn't smart enough to not post the Tailgate thread if the game thread is up. Won't be an issue in the future.