Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So how’s it going?
Laws are complicated. As mentioned in another post, the server is hosted in Finland, by a German hosting company, run by a Dutch admin, behind Cloudflare bot protection based in the US. Any of those countries could have a law that makes this illegal.
But even worse, a comparatively small website run on donations doesn’t need to break a law to get shut down, they just need to have enough legal challenges to make it too costly to continue (they likely could not afford even one court case, even if they were likely to win).
As an instance admin this stuff is always in the back of my mind. Another reason I’m keen to not grow too quick, so we can sort out these sorts of issues.
I get what you’re saying, but it wasn’t like they received a dmca notice or cease and desist. It was just a random new user asking them to do it. I just don’t see how they could have got in trouble immediately without the option to defederate or block those communities in the case of a legal notice.
In any case piracy communities all know not to post or host any direct links. Even reddit’s piracy subreddit has lasted for a long time.
I guess the beauty of the fediverse is that it’s simple enough to move to another instance instead of just losing access.
It’s possible that request prompted a review of what was allowed, and they realised those communities broke their rules.
Not saying it was necessarily the right decision, but it doesn’t necessarily mean something nefarious went on.
Yeah it definitely comes across as a bit of an odd sequence of events. I seem to recall there were more examples of similar actions from lemmy.world as well.