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.
Exactly. I’m deciding between these two - I am not impressed at all on how this was handled, and I have already decided that I am not going to be loyal to this instance. Half contemplating migrating everything and screwing off honestly, but I am scared of my new smaller home instance disappearing into the void, bringing my entire account with it, which is why I chose lemmy.world. to begin with. Is that a thing that might happen?
Possibly.
You should look for middle sized instances. Those are not as big as lemmy.world so they’re less likely to have to do this kind of stuff, but also big and steady enough that they’re not likely to randomly disappear one day.