This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
Very true…as long as the federation of servers remains as it is now, but I’m increasingly worried it won’t.
I mean, yes, Dbzer0 still exists, and yes, you can access it from other instances, but Lemmy.world is the biggest one and users here being cut off from it from here will strangle the amount of activity it gets. Visibility is important for the health of other instances and their communities. There’s a good reason why alternative subreddits never outgrow the main ones.
There’s also a sentiment among some admins and some of the contributors to both Lemmy and the Sublinks project that feels like it runs counter to the premise of Lemmy as whole: an unwillingness commit to a truly shared space or adhere to a standard for what federation is supposed to mean. Instances are not only encouraged to do whatever, they’re being given more tools to. And that’s good for fighting spam, child porn, and malicious instances, but it doesn’t stop there.
I really hope an app or frontend comes along at some point that will seamlessly combine instance accounts and “fill in the blanks” created by instance admins so users can have a clear picture of Lemmy, regardless of the instance they’re on.
Yes and no. While it’s true that piracy might not get “drive-by” traffic from l.w. users, those users who become aware of it, or who want to access it will be forced to create an account elsewhere than l.w. which will also help with redistributing users to smaller instances.