Unremoval of Piracy Communities
Unremoval of Piracy Communities
Hello World!
As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
- [email protected],
- [email protected],
- [email protected], and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!
We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.
With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!
Lemmy.world Team
❤️
This is what I like to see. Not just heels digging in, but explanations as to why, the follow-ups, the investigation of options and follow through. Thanks for the transparency. Piracy has and won’t ever go away. I used to pirate due to lack of money and resources. When I had those I went legit. When legit sources started turning into:
- monthly subscriptions for everything
- when legit sources suddenly delete or remove content from their systems (to avoid paying taxes?)
- when the rates go up for everything (internet access AND streaming services)
- now ads in your paid services unless you pay more (Amazon)
- Plex trying to go legit and police where and how people run their private streaming, fucking over license holders who built the financial footing they could stand on in the first place. Cool.
You can’t rely on any shit from these services, except for one shit… enshittification.
I don’t want to sound negative, but as a consumer, it’s been nothing but ads rammed down our throats from everywhere we go and look. They lie, they change rates, they shrinkflate, while their pockets get bigger. Long live piracy.
From lemmy.world's perspective, I get it. Our current legal framework makes it damn near impossible from a financial standpoint to take a stand against corporations with pocketbooks the size of some first world countries.
But the rise in piracy is a direct consequence of these corporations' actions against their very users.
Piracy has and always will be a service problem. I don't think lemmy should be used to share torrents for example. But honest discussion about the current state of affairs and alternatives should be allowed.
The admins took a measured approach here and it's one that is refreshing given the regime that many of us came from.
One of the reasons I explore the high seas is that some shows I want to watch are not legally available to watch in my region at all.
the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.
content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money
so it seems to me there are three paths here:
-
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)
-
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price
-
studios branch off into competing streaming services
i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.
Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.
The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn't (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.
They can do this, because there's monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.
Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).
Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.
"Content" at a minimum requires a video camera and people to stand in front of it. It's involving hundreds of people in a production that's expensive. People just hurl money at big centralized services, with the same mentality they had with cable TV, and of course they spend ungodly amounts, because they make even more. There's all kinds of models that can work better than this.
i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
They don't. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it's their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.
The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.
Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.
A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn't make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.
Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.
Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.
The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.
Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.
-
More price hikes! More Ads! More tracking!
Plex can go can screw themselves. I've been self hosting for over a decade (and stupidly spent hundreds of dollars on a PlexPass instead of buying a lifetime one early on) and finally decided to move to the cloud. Two weeks later I get an email saying that they're blocking my connection in about 3 weeks and to move to a more expensive hosting company if I want to avoid getting blocked. I'm not the one violating their ToS, but yet I'm getting screwed.
Wait, what happened with Plex? I’m in the dark on that one.
There's a bunch of analytics tracking and cloud integration in Plex. They are interested in what users are watching, which is concerning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/7bim8n/plex_analytics_analyticsplextv/
Switch to Jellyfin or another open source server.
Yep I pirated all music in college when I was poor. Now that I am not poor, I buy it all from Bandcamp.
Bandcamp was nice while it lasted https://www.wired.com/story/epic-games-sale-bandcamp-music-platform-limbo/
Yet another informative post, and a decision that takes some guts and you're willing to take on some extra work and risk in order to make the instance better
I didn't want to have to do this, but you've brought this upon yourself. You give me no choice but to... donate money to you which you so damn well deserve!
Let this be a reminder that actions have consequences!
Let this be a reminder that actions have consequences!
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN.. WHEN WILL YOU LEARN.. THAT YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CoNcEqUeNcEs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN.. WHEN WILL YOU LEARN.. THAT YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CoNcEqUeNcEs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think this is the mark of a decent admin team, the ability to re-evaluate a decision based on new or better data. I'm more inclined to stick with lemmy.world in the future, even through decisions I don't necessarily agree with .
Whereas on Reddit, it'd be used to justify a slippery slope. "We've already banned X and Y, so banning Z is just an extension of that."
Even better, they did this because they knew it was unpopular with people and have since been trying to find a solution. That's an excellent leadership quality.
I'm glad you guys took a measured approach. This right here is the difference between a corporation and Lemmy. I can't imagine a for-profit reversing its decision in the interest of the community unless it affected their bottom line or stock price. Hats off to the admin team for working through all these complex issues.
Hey that's great, good job! I'm so unused to any disappointing decision being reversed, this really is an amazing site.
Now please unremove the shroom community as next priority. Empowering open minded people with the option and knowledge to heal themselves through the use of psychadelics (and other kinds of mushrooms that can potentially help fight diseases such as cancer) that they can grow themselves without big pharma and giving them a community to share their advice+experiences is the right thing to do.
Since its Lemmy world its a weird indeed. Mushrooms are not even illegal in like 1/3rd of the world countries and decriminalized/not enforced in the other 3rd. Pretty interesting wiki read actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_psilocybin_mushrooms
Any context why it was blocked?
This is weird to me. What's the reasoning for that? We're people selling crap on there or something? If it's just discussion I really do not see the problem.
If you want people to take your hobby seriously, drop the cult language. Seriously, healing yourself? Fighting cancer?
Come on now, next you're going to try to sell me crystals that absorb bad vibes or something.
This reads as bait to me. You can see multiple peoples testimonies in the replies confirming that psychedelics succeeded in helping them or those they personally know, where repeated conventional therapy failed them. The long term repairing improvement of a persons mental and spiritual well-being also counts as 'healing' to me as well as many other people.
In the off chance you are genuinely interested in the 'helps fight disease such as cancer' claim, here is a ted talk by a professional mycologist. Its about mushrooms improving the human immune system. At the end he shares the very personal story of his elderly mother developing stage 4 breast cancer basically being told she was too old for conventional treatments and was done for. Only for her to make a full recovery after taking a few medications along with turkey tail mushrooms. You can skip to 9:00 to hear the story.
Fantastic Fungi is a good documentary on netflix if you would like to learn more, very well made and accessible to the common person IMO
Thats all I have to say. I hope you are open minded and learn something new if you decide to check out the ted talk and documentary. If you think its all snake oil BS anyways there probably isn't much I can say to sway your opinion. Hope you have a good one.
Thank you for the very informative post. Your professional way of handling the issue, puts corporate professionals, "cough" Reddit "cough", look like the amateurs they really are
That's what I thought while reading this. After being on reddit for so long posts like these are such a breathe of fresh air. In my time on Reddit the trend was ALWAYS 1: bad changes 2: worse change 3: nothing, it just becomes the new normal then, if anything 4: even worse changes.
Blows my mind to see a site be cognizant of their users, listen to them and actually idk, work to fix things? Bravo.
"Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it."
A lesson u/spez forgot.
Nah, currently u/spez is Counting his money for the next increase of API costs.
This line is best if spoken like a pirate
As always, appreciate both the transparency and the hard work and effort to make sure you are doing what is best for the community even if it isn't always easy! ♥️
Absolutely right
This is my first comment ever using this platform.
@antidote101 @lwadmin Welcome💞
you want a brownie button?
Are those the little mini brownie things? If so, yes, that sounds delightful.
What exactly do you think the upvote button is? You know brown is just a shade of orange.
Glad I can use this as my main instance again. Love the transparency of the mod team even if I don't always agree with the decisions.
We can't always please everyone. And sometimes we have to make decisions or do things we personally don't like or we would like to see differently but we have to think about both our team and our userbase.
But thank you for your trust and welcome back.
These posts reassure me that I chose the right instance. Thank you!
What does instance do exactly? I'm using boost for lemmy and just picked the first one on the list...
It's basically your entry point into the fediverse. You can still read and comment on other instances, as long as your instance is playing nice with others.
You can even set up your own and connect boost to that if you like. You'll still be part of the bigger 'verse.
Good Communication is the key for everything
Nah man, tried this with my dog. He still humps the pizza delivery guy's leg
Thank you for doing all of this including writing this post. The haters are binary thinkers who can't be bothered with pesky things like "context" and "reality"
To all the people saying "too late, I already switched": why bother commenting?
I think it's fine and healthy for the fediverse if people spread out across different servers, it distributes the hosting cost.
I don't see a problem with announcing they "moved and aren't coming back despite the reversal" on this particular thread, it appears relevant.
Why bother pointing out people commenting? I guess we're all a little confused.
To explore the human condition 🤠
It's the same as the people leaving Reddit but still talking about it
To show what happens if you don't listen to the community before making changes, I'm guessing.
But they are not incentivized to grow numbers exponentially like shareholder funded companies. They make money from community involvement and value-added services. Instead, they removed these type of contents because they felt like those communities needed to reform their overall community personality. In the end, it is all a community effort to help one another. now that users have switched, there is less legal pressure, and the people who moved have helped make these other servers better. It was a win-win for us. I am grateful to all the people who made the move and participated in posting to their respective communities.
Also, this helps lessen the host cost on them. Lastly, a federated community is not the same as these mega corps.
Too late, already commented. And switched. ;)
Well, I did it too, and it is not worth making a whole comment about it because all of our reasons are predictable and this is the Fediverse and spreading is good.
Now, I'm a bit out of the loop with the server uptime and all, but maybe if things are better I can consider Lemmy.world my backup account again... because I don't really have one anymore.
I thank you for the work put into reversing the block.
Love the username, such fond memories.
Aye matey, aye matey. 🏴☠️
This is why lemmy is already better than Reddit. Thanks for being transparent and following through.
Excellent news. Respect.
Thank you for being willing to protect this service when necessary, and improve it when able.
Thank you for being so transparent with us.
Well damn, thanks for getting it done. Didn't think it would happen and I wasn't surprised you guys wanted to avoid the legal risk.
Great news!
Dbzer0 is my home for a reason
Best placr on lemmy <3
With great admins too. Nothing but respect for @db0 and his team
Thank you a lot for the hard work and also for being introspective and finding flexible solutions.
Do what you want because a pirate is free! You are a pirate!
Yar har fiddle dee dee Being a pirate is all right with me!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Goddamn that's a banger
Damn straight.
This was the right move.
This is amazing! You love to see it!
because we were already receiving takedown requests
How are you dealing with these now?
have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves
Is this just in relation to the attacks or also the content, can you share anything?
Assuming they don't want to end up like Aaron Swartz... I'm guessing they are deleted. Unfortunately it's just too expensive to try to fight DMCA notices. Kim Dotcom has been trying that for a full decade now - his legal costs have surely stretched into tens of millions of dollars and he's lost pretty much every step of the way. All the money he's burned on this has delayed a lengthy prison sentence, he's unlikely to win and would have got a lighter sentence with an early guilty plea.
As to the tooling... AFAIK it's not possible to delete some things in Lemmy. I expect they've fixed that now. At least for things that are likely to be on the receiving end of a DMCA notice.
You guys rock. I fucking love lemmy 🐭
Finally I can talk about these John Meyer live bootlegs
SHUT IT DOWN!!!!
"Re-re-reupdate: We may have made a terrible mistake..."
Awesome
And of course this happens the day after I finally export my subscriptions to my other account to be able to see piracy in the feed of my main 😂
Not complaining, mind you, just marveling at my own bad timing 😂
I didn't bother to export mine since they're mostly Lemmy.world communities and at the time I was under the impression that they were either going to start banning dbzer0 users who participated in [email protected] or defederate altogether. So I just subscribed to different communities on there, such as the lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz equivalents since in both of those possibilities the lemmy.world communities wouldn't be usable for me.
Hear Ye, Nerevar, and listen well. 'Tis I, Lord Dagoth, master of these lands, who brings you the gospel of gaming. Games are not just a means of fun and entertainment, but also a way of preserving our history. Piracy, which so many foolish people seem to hate, is a necessary means of archiving old games, lest they be lost forever. As for the Argonians, and other beasts that call themselves 'gamers,' their greed knows no bounds. Their constant calls for new games only fuel the fires of corruption and destruction that blight the industry.
Finally. I've been more active over on .ml because of this. Glad you guys are reasonable and reversed the decision.
How have you determined these communities are no longer a legal concern?
I’d hope so, because they never were a legal concern
Man I love lemmy
Nice!!
Fair play
A very good decision 🙂
It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn’t want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Understandable. I am curious, how do instances deal with take down notices for another instance?
they can't aside from issuing a deletion from its local instance, won't remove the parent post but it will remove it from the local server. IF I understand it right anyway
Respect, Lemmy, respect.
Yeeeessss! These unique communities are what brought me to Reddit. I hope that carries over to Lemmy! Thanks ❤️
SMH people always forget that a good pirate never takes another person's property.
And a great pirate happily shares their copies with everyone.
In piracy, no one takes anything from anyone. They just make a copy.
Fuck yes. Thaaaaaaaaank you so much!
Even if this weren’t what I wanted, I’m delighted to see leaders who can change their minds. Thank you for that, too.
❤️
YAYYYY
Was worried after the first week that the decision was made and moved past but I'm very happy to see that not he the case. I like this instance but the removal of communities I browse is tough to look past so this is much appreciated.
I guess I can use this account then
Parley!
Better late than never
Good
Fantastic news! Welcome back ye landlubbers
🫡
Finally. I can pirate the whole entire One Piece Anime series. All 1,075 of episodes. Jkjkjkjk. It is good to see transparency and communication.
So did you also get Kickstarted by the live action version?
piracy has been removed again
Fantastic news. Really appreciate the openness these last weeks.
Im not on lemmy.world but this is still pretty cool
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Gooooood
Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Great stuff, thanks!
amazing work modmins, thank you so much!
👍
Great News 👏👏👏
Yay
Nice.
I didn't agree with your decision and decided to move because of it. Glad to see that you worked the issue and this was resolved.
👏👏👏
Piracy is a right of the people as far I'm concerned, a way to fight back against corruption
Never should have blocked them in the first place.
Exactly
Show me someone who claims to have always been legit and I show you someone who has lied at least once.
I don't mind piracy much but don't rely on it anymore.
But I can perfectly understand if Lemmy wants to distance from Pirate/Warez Sites. Those Sites may cooperate between themselves but not within the Lemmy Backbone.
Give me upvotes to proof its unblocked
Mildly irritating that I've got to manually block those communities... but it's whatever
Add it to the list of the other stuff you probably bloc k
Oh no, what a nightmare.
Don't mean to sound harsh, buts it's too little too late for me.
Already made the switch to lemm.ee, and the trust that something similar won't be done in the future just isn't there.
Oh man, not THE Kuro... Admins, what are you going to do about this? Guess it's time to press power off on the server
How dare someone give their opinion, right?
Too late I've already delete my lemmy.world account
This isn't an airport, no need to announce your departure.
I dreamed of this moment. Thank you
k
Good for you... anyways... what were we saying?
And nothing of value was lost
No because thanks for the fediverse I've just created an account elsewhere. Boom
I am fairly sure that good parts of that post are lies, I looked quite close at the situation when it happened and from all I could find those "takedown requests" was a single troll who got banned dbzer0 for their right extreme garbage. You also made claims about unmoderated illegal material in those communities which was simply wrong but I would have understood the move if you explained it like you do here right from the start and it's great to see a mistake reversed! I am not going to pretend that this Federation while not actually illegal can't cause annoyances and it's great to see you reverse it despite that, keep it up! :)
"I DID MY OWN RESEARCH" vibes. What, you think takedown requests would be made in threads? Or that we would announce them publicly?
You are absolutely clueless.
This isn’t just “their own research”, this was widely known at the height of all of this. Tbh the reaction here is super weird, but I’ve been away from World for a while so maybe this is just what it’s like now.
Edit: Here’s a post that goes over it a little. Not in detail, but just talking about that troll a bit more and showing some modlogs.
Edit: And here’s db0 literally confirming it
You announced a clear reasoning publically that included a lot of questionable stuff, I am sorry if you got actual takedown requests too but I can't know those if you don't announce them. Again I won't claim that this can't cause you any trouble, just that the thread you published about blocking them wasn't great...
Can you cite this info? Just curious 😊
The original removal thread cited the report of a user who got banned from dbzer0 for transphobic messages and made a fresh account on lemmy.world just to report them and talked about potentially copyrighted material they don't want to store. None of that matched with the responses from dbzer0 or my own experience on that instance. The Piracy and Arnachy instance has been one of the best examples of good moderation and civil behaviour on Lemmy since they moved here.
Tinfoil hat time 🤡.
Takedown requests, ofc, companies & foundations should allways make those public 🙄🤯.
If they write a thread with questionable reasoning I would expect them to include the actual reason as well or skip the thread but you guys are right, I don't own a instance so I don't have a clue about those actions...
Fuck the pirates.
I get what you're trying to say, but at the same time the corps say "fuck our customers". You're a number. They don't want you to have anything and they just want your money. Look at Amazon pulling purchased books from kindle users. And they're not the only ones.
