lemmy.world blocked the largest piracy community in all of lemmy

mayo , 10 months ago

Wow fuck that.

I’m going to home on lemmy.today or lemmy.sdf.org.

mayo , 10 months ago

Better

Blaze , 10 months ago

Or github.com/CMahaff/lasim

elementalguy2 , 10 months ago

I don’t think the SDF group will ever defederate or block communities, it’s all up to user preference.

gamey , 10 months ago

Am I glad that I just switched instance anyway, I only subscribed to one of those previously but now I will subscribe to all three just because I can!

IYeetKids , 10 months ago

I am glad I chose an instance with a lower userbase

Anon819450514 , 10 months ago

Come on over to our canadian instance at lemmy.ca We accept everybody and are kind with everyone!

wahming , 10 months ago

Eh

FangedWyvern42 , 10 months ago

This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.

woelkchen , 10 months ago

Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.

Luvs2Spuj , 10 months ago

Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?

LateSilver , 10 months ago

Nintendo aggressively pursues copyright claims, often spuriously.

ICastFist , 10 months ago

What Sega doesn’t

No, wait

Thanks4Nothing , 10 months ago

Great summary on this Episode of Darker Diaries from last week

can , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Not enough apparently

woelkchen , 10 months ago

Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?

Sued him (so far nothing irregular) and he has to pay 10 million dollars or something along this magnitude. Bottom line is, he will have to give a good portion of his income for the rest of his life to Nintendo. OK, that guy was kinda stupid and monetized the website through ads but the punishment is still super excessive for something that resulted in no bodily harm for anyone. Meanwhile, the ROM site could be googled and yet Google is still free to allow users to find pirated media. YouTube started as a video piracy platform (not officially, of course, but unlicensed uploads of popular videos were the reason YouTube grew so much). LW admins will not be granted the same luxury.

cottonmon , 10 months ago

Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?

ActuallyRuben , 10 months ago

They sold a physical switch hacking device

cottonmon , 10 months ago

Ah, looked more into it and yes, it appears I was mistaken. What got Bowser though is that it appears that they also set up access to roms though I don’t know if this was included in the purchase of the device.

This was from one of his e-mails:

“I [am] going to be busy setting up the ‘underground’ stuff (rompacks, coverarts, emulators) on maxconsole forums, that will also help on ‘grey side’ of the device for those wishing to play more than original snes cartridges,” Bowser wrote in an email quoted in the indictment against him.

“We have a plan in the works to have secure links to these retro rompacks on a protected server, so it will not be a problem,” Bowser said in another quoted email.

woelkchen , 10 months ago

Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?

Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t look up the exact details before writing because the overall point remains that courts punish individuals exceptionally hard for copyright offenses.

Ganrokh , 10 months ago

In 2018, someone maintaining a ROM site was ordered to pay Nintendo $12 million.

In late 2021, someone was sentenced to 10 years of prison and to pay Nintendo $14.5 million. That person got out on good behavior last April, but 25-30% of their wages are going to be garnished until their debt to Nintendo is paid off - which will likely take the rest of their life.

dustyData , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Recently Nintendo closed a lawsuit where the person in question is basically doomed to a lifetime of financial ruin. He was to spend 3 years in prison but was released and owes Nintendo $10 million. Nintendo, the poor indie company, is now entitled to 25% up to 30% of his income for the rest of his life. Gary Bowser Vs. Nintendo.

quicksand , 10 months ago

His name is fucking Bowser!? He needs to sue Nintendo for infringing on his trademark

Gork , 10 months ago

Hmm, an amount of $10 million to sue Nintendo for trademark infringement sounds fair.

iByteABit , 10 months ago

Fuck Nintendo, jesus

cottonmon , 10 months ago

Here’s an article that has more details on what happened.

Thanks4Nothing , 10 months ago

Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)

fiat_lux , 10 months ago

I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you're going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it's an unfair battle from the start.

I can't blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There's a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it's protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.

fugepe , 10 months ago

Lmao removeds. I’m leaving

SaltyLemon , 10 months ago

WOW! Turns out lemmy.world is managed by even bigger dickheads than reddit. Fucking pussies.

joe , 10 months ago

Glad I host my own instance so I get to choose what I get to see.

daFRAKKINpope , 10 months ago

Welp, time to find a new instance.

foksmash , 10 months ago

I just used that lasim tool and it worked perfectly.

balance_sheet , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

That’s a real bummer although fully understandable. I will always support lemmy.world.

I don’t get how people are this mad when you can literally always selfhost and have the experience you want to have. It’s not like they’re trying to censor everything like beehaw did. It’s protecting the instance from any legal consequences that is very real.

Kecessa , 10 months ago

Why? That’s the whole principle of decentralization, not having to support one host in particular…

o_0 , 10 months ago

What an absolutely cowardly move. It’s one thing to not allow piracy on your own server, that’s you’re right, but to prevent your users from accessing communities on other servers? Way to give in to copyright trolls without even being asked. I would understand even if they received some kind of Cease and Desist. It doesn’t seem like it, it seems like they’re just willing sycophants who will probably federate with Meta at first opportunity.

HobbitFoot , 10 months ago

The problem with how this system works is that you have to accept all content on your servers that you federate with. Even linking can violate DMCA.

o_0 , 10 months ago

that may technically be true, but I think people should be more willing to take a stand, and not just pre-emptively bow down to the copyright trolls, because it’s basically legally unenforceable especially the larger this the federation gets

I’ll give them credit that they didn’t defed the entire instance and I guess it’s their server their rules

HobbitFoot , 10 months ago

If you want to take a stand, host your own instance. If you aren’t willing to do that, you are just hoping someone else will suffer the consequences for you.

o_0 , 10 months ago

to my knowledge this is the one instance that isn’t willing to take that stand lol, it should be understand that all instances in the federation share a common interest to protect their users against copyright trolls

HobbitFoot , 10 months ago

That is the beauty of federation. You don’t have to accept everything because it is a choice of the different instances. There is no collective, but a series of independent voices.

o_0 , 10 months ago

I respect the right of the autonomy of instances and like I said, this is something within the domain of their individual moderation decisions, but we do in fact share collective interests, it’s like with federating with facebook, it’s not just a matter of individual instance preferences, anyone who federates with Meta would be blocked by everyone who isn’t because they then become data mining conduits.

This is somewhat similar to the DCMA issue, the copyright trolls are the enemy of all of us and if you’re willing to compromise with them without even a plausible legal threat. Well that hurts the rest of us. You might as well be inviting them to go after the other evil pirate instances.

Flatworm7591 , 10 months ago

The fact is we don’t allow copyrighted material, torrent files or direct download links on c/piracy anyway, it’s against our rules. So this whole thing is based on a malicious misrepresentation of our community, initiated by a user with a grudge against us, because we banned him for posting anti-trans and racist content.

Skoobie , 10 months ago

People gonna look out for their legal selves. Can’t be mad about that. I moved to avoid the occasional downtimes. Extra benefit that monero doesn’t block these communities. I know they’re hosted in Germany so maybe that’s the difference?

Secret300 , 10 months ago

I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was “oh no what now” but with lemmy it’s just “time to move to another instance”

HawlSera , 10 months ago

I love it. We will win in the end, against the corpos, they shall rule in Hell whilst we serve in Heaven

ech , 10 months ago

Normal people not wanted to put themselves in legal jeopardy doesn’t make them a “corpo”.

synae , 10 months ago

Uhhh I think you misunderstand the original quote

HawlSera , 10 months ago

Not really, in seeking to gain power, they create something worthless by destroying what is valuable, but by working together, we create something glorious that none of us are really in charge of.

synae , 10 months ago

usually god, the ultimate authoritarian, is in charge of heaven. i’ll pass

HawlSera , 10 months ago

Thank you for taking my metaphor too literally just for the edge

vrtra , 10 months ago

Reddit has plenty of piracy communities, being more strict than reddit is is just unnecessary

pozbo , 10 months ago

We should just move posting to reddit and have the lemmy instance in question only be links to reddit posts.

Desistance , 10 months ago

They also had quite a few subs that got shut down due to copyright threats. Reddit can afford to fight multimillion dollar suits.

TakingOnWater , 10 months ago

I just don’t like the idea of having 500 accounts after it’s all said and done, especially if most of them wind up being unused… unless I’m fundamentally doing something wrong by creating a new account on every instance I want to use?

Blaze , 10 months ago

You don’t need an account for every instance.

How it will mostly evolve in the future is that people will have one vanilla account, and if they want, one account for piracy and another for porn

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

you need an account to go to an instance that isn’t federated. this is the core flaw that makes this entire system unusable for normal people. you don’t want to have multiple accounts just so you can post the same memes in 12 different servers to get 1/40th the interaction you would get if everyone was centralized. this isn’t a discord server, its a link aggregator and decentralizing the aggregator is antithetical to making this service work.

MrShankles , 10 months ago

Idk, I like it

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

it doesn’t mater what you like, if the platform can not grow from here, witch it can not in its current state, it will simply bleed users and die like voat.

Mane25 , 10 months ago

Or just find an instance that has federation policies you agree with, you don’t need to post in every single instance - maybe some defederated because there were too many people posting the same shitty memes. And who needs 40x interaction? Reddit was too big, too many people competing for attention.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

and then that instance get defederated by one of the big instances or has other performance issues because its not one of the big instances and now you’re stuck picking from the big instances if you want any kind of content and curation on a socialmedia platform built to centralize users into interest groups so they can curate and discuss content. but yeah, defederatino is good for that, lets you live in your completely unpopulated bubble.

Mane25 , 10 months ago

Very hypothetical there, like you’re reaching for things that could go wrong.

I know that centralisation doesn’t work because I’ve seen it turn the internet to shit over the last 15 years. If I had it my way we’d go back to small independent forums with no federation because they were much better communities. But in the name of progress, federation does have some advantages, but as soon as things start getting too big there should absolutely be defederation to prevent the platform from getting like Reddit.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

im telling you things that are happening right not to various instances for various reasons, all of them down to the personal bias of the admins, not the consensus of the users in that instance.

Mane25 , 10 months ago

Who says they need consensus? Instances are privately run, they don’t have to be democracies. Users can vote with their feet, so to speak.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

yeah, the admins can just make unilateral changes to their platform, that isn’t the problem with every form of socialmedia, no, its something else.

Mane25 , 10 months ago

Correct, because it’s decentralised. It only becomes a problem when you have a monopoly of big centralised platforms.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

You fundamentally so not understand the problem with federation and the admins. Is not a good thing just because it is, it’s the same problem, in a different coat.

Blaze , 10 months ago

To be honest, if that person is so keen on centralized platform, why are they even here? They should just go back to Reddit, they might come back here later

ShittyKopper , 10 months ago

what was the centralized one everyone went to? squabbles?

wait nope the admin turned out to be a free speech nutjob and everyone left. uhhh, discuit? i think that’s a thing?

jeena , 10 months ago

I just spun up my own instance and federate with whoever I want.

quicksand , 10 months ago

What kind of specs do you need to run a personal instance? I’d like to, but I don’t really want to invest in a bunch of computer stuff right now

redcalcium , 10 months ago

Eh, as long as it can run Linux, >2gb of RAM, and >50GB of storage, even a raspberry pi can host Lemmy.

quicksand , 10 months ago

No way! I’ve got a r pi 4 buried somewhere in my garage. Gonna have to try to set up my own instance. Is there a starter guide for people of limited intelligence? How’d you get yours set up?

myrmidex , 10 months ago

Yunohost has a Lemmy app

redcalcium , 10 months ago

Lemmy Easy Deploy has ARM64 support.

After you got lemmy up and running on your raspberry pi, the next hurdle is making it accessible from the internet so other lemmy instances can federate with your instance. There are several way to do that, such as getting a static ip address from your ISP and forwarding port 80 and 443 to your pi from your router config, using clodflare tunnel, etc.

Just ask the selfhost community if you hit a roadblock. They love getting more people to join their rank.

quicksand , 10 months ago

Great! Thanks for the tips. Happy to find my next project lol

jeena , 10 months ago

I got the cheapest VPS from Hetzner which is around 5 EUR.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

until your instance gets banned for being too small once the system reaches critical mass.

jeena , 10 months ago

Better than than now.

ShittyKopper , 10 months ago

i have been on the mastodon side of the fedi since 2018

single user instances do not get defed’d out of nowhere. i’ve rarely (if ever) seen that happen. now if you’re an asshole in a single user instance then maybe, but there isn’t anyone going “ooh i’m gonna defederate from this guy” without you provoking them in some way.

dmmeyournudes , 10 months ago

When single user interfaces start becoming problematic, they will be. Neither of these platforms have reached a large enough size to need it, but it will eventually be necessary for groups of servers to only federated with themselves to ensure compatibility and scalability. We already have issues with propagating content, systemic and programmaticly.

adrian783 , 10 months ago

I mean you won’t, they way it’s going to shake out is instances with similar values form nation-states and cut ties with other nation-states they dont agree with

well probably see the emergence of meta-alliances soon that dictate the degree of separation of a blacklisted instance.

stillwater , 10 months ago

Oh so like the lunch tables in Mean Girls.

Countmacula , 10 months ago

I mean saying 500 is a little hyperbolic but this is exactly why federation exists and isn’t just another Reddit.

You find what you like and go there. It’s really no different than the old forums. Reddit centralized everything, lemmy is that but also the old way.

linearchaos , 10 months ago

I feel a little better about it if lemmy provided migration tools.

It certainly not the end of the world but it is kind of a pain in the ass.

Pratai , 10 months ago

I say, good for them. Nothing good will come from them keeping that path open. As I already have all piracy instances blocked- it’s of no consequence to me, but if lemmy.world sees this a necessary to their survival/success, good for them.

And that’s also the beauty of lemmy… if people don’t like how an instance is run, they can find another. There are plenty that will work for whatever you’re into. Wether it’s piracy, or any other illegal act.

nortorc , 10 months ago

Oh man. It’s not like I can’t understand the logic behind it, but active niche communities are the one thing lemmy really lacks as of right now, and piracy was one of the earliest and biggest exceptions to that. What a shame.