After a thread was made in !support@lemmy.world asking to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com for “the facilitation of piracy, and copyright infringement in general which is illegal”, the admins of lemmy.world deleted it prompting discussions on !asklemmy[@]lemmy.ml and !piracy[@]lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Well I am an American and I support American values, so as far as I’m concerned it’s wrong and illegal.
Also isn’t lemmy.world in America? Pretty sure it is since they did remove two of their communites for this very reason:This is the dumbest detail for me to get hung up on, but lemmy.world is hosted in Finland on servers rented from a German company by a Dutch admin.
All of their comments mentioning USA had me genuinely pissed off for a moment when I read it. Shut that “america #1” bullshit the hell up when you’re on the net.
Signed- Texas born vet.
They’re probably nazi bots. World has a FUCKLOAD of them.
Don’t create accounts on different Lemmy servers they said, one is all you need they said. Simply find the one where the values and judgement of the admins wholly reflect your own despite there being no effective way to make that determination.
Huh, I don’t think I heard that a single time. I did hear that you could access most content from any account, but I was encouraged early on to make multiple anyway.
Defederation is quickly becoming the first resort for admins.
What other resorts can they go to?
User bans, community bans, warnings. Or in this situation, not doing anything because it doesnt affect your instance at all.
Are admins responsible for the content that shows up in all? And from a legal perspective, if they were investigated for hosting and distributing copyrighted material what would their liability be?
User bans and community bans and warnings don’t work too well across instances for managing the content on all… unless you want to go about warning and banning users on your site to not subscribe to content on other instances that would lead to problems.
(edit)
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 assitance in obtaining it.
The admins could play whack-a-mole with the /c’s hosted there that are pro piracy or otherwise not honoring copyright… though that’s kind of the point of the site: “Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Disregard Copyrights”. At some point, it’s going to be more work doing that than it is worth it to have their content federated to lemmy.world.
No instance is responsible for the entirety of the all feed, and this place isnt like reddit where they host every sub centrally. Dbzero is a server, any piracy hosting or distribution is only on their server.
Is the server admin responsible for federated data stored in the database and accessible via a URL on their instance?
This is a question that the admins of lemmy.world would rather not have to answer and so were proactive in removing /c’s and defederating from instances that could cause them problems.
For a United States hosted instance, reading https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer is probably a good idea (and spending the $6 to register someone as a DMCA agent who gets the copyright complaints and can follow the process for dealing with them to ensure the instance maintains its safe harbor status).
Paying protection money and doing free work so that you dont get punished for crimes you arent committing, legal words cannot describe how much i hate you and the system youre endorsing.
This is the system that the EFF is endorsing - the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit for defending civil liberties.
For people hosting instances, however, it can also mean some legal risk. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to mitigate that risk – if you plan ahead. To help people do that, this guide offers an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations.
Two important notes: (1) This guide is focused on legal risks that flow from hosting other people’s content, under U.S. law. In general, the safe harbors and immunities discussed below will not protect you if you are directly infringing copyright or defaming someone. (2) Many of us at EFF are lawyers, but we are not YOUR lawyers. This guide is intended to offer a high-level overview of U.S. law and should not be taken as legal advice specific to your particular situation.
…
The safe harbor doesn’t apply automatically. First, the safe harbor is subject to two disqualifiers: (1) actual or “red flag” knowledge of specific infringement; and (2) profiting from infringing activity if you have the right and ability to control it. The standards for these categories are contested; if you are concerned about them, you may wish to consult a lawyer.
Second, a provider must take some affirmative steps to qualify: Designate a DMCA agent with the Copyright Office.
By registering a DMCA agent for your site, you get to tell people who are saying “there’s copyrighted material on your site that you are hosting” to fill out the proper forms that includes their name and address and a bunch more information that they are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. If they don’t have that, then you get tell them to pound sand.
This is a much better alternative for protecting a site than talking to lawyers when you don’t have the ability to rely upon section 230 as a defense for hosting user generated content.
I am for protecting the fediverse from over zealous copyright holders and copyright trolls with every legal tool available. That also comes with following the laws that exist and trying to mitigate any danger to the staff and users.
Lemmy.world is a large instance with a big target painted on it and probably many fewer lawyers than Reddit has on retainer. As such, removing piracy and copyright infringement from a site are reasonable steps to make sure that while DDOSs can take down the site, it will be harder for lawyers to do so.
Wow spending money to be a proactive asshole.
This was a community ban, not a defederation
Like I don’t want to blow it outta proportion but this seems like a bad sign for the future of lemmy if it’s that easy to just go around and convince someone to defederate.
I honestly don’t think this sort of drama is a big deal. The users are empowered to do something about it, unlike centralized platforms, where drama gets a result like we see on reddit: nothing happens.
The account that made the thread is 8 hours old, and not even from lemmy.world. homeboy is a sad piece of shit. I deleted my .world account, looking into a hexbear or maybe lemmy.dbzer0 account down the line.
I can’t even load the world post because they’re down as usual. What a piece of shit instance. How are they the largest? Maybe lemming is the best term.
They’re probably down because being the largest made them a target. Every other instance is vulnerable to the same attacks. Below is the text from their post on the subject.
vvvvvvvv
Hello there!
It has been a while since our last update, but it’s about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.
So let’s go over some of these misconceptions together.
“Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse”.
While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network
The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don’t like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.
And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members.
“Lemmy.World should close down registrations”
Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what’s what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn’t even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.
Which brings us to the third point:
“Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that’s why the server is down all the time”
This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.
The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they’ll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very ‘expensive’ sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.
So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That’s one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.
“Why do they need another sysop who works for free”
Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.
We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.
World is trash and it needs to be broken up. The admins are trash, their rules are trash, they’re full of nazis and they go down all of the time. It’s profoundly stupid that we let them be the on ramp. We should all defederate from them to force an exodus.
Hard to fault them for the down time being that they’re getting regularly hit with ddos attacks. Someone sure wants them gone.
Yes it is. That’s a solvable issue.
They have “solved” it many times. The people doing it clearly know what the most resource intensive requests are with Lemmy, and whenever one vector is patched they come up with another.
To be clear: every Lemmy instance has the same vulnerability as World does. World is likely getting attacked because they’re the biggest. They aren’t having any other kind of resource issue - it’s not a problem because of the number of people.
I’m personally faulting the people attacking it and not the admins. They didn’t cause the situation, and I’m not going to let assholes manipulate me into leaving.
