Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:
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 assistance in obtaining it.
This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.
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.
I absolutely agree with you that piracy is largely a response to real issues that businesses should address. Of course it’s not fair that a subscription fee will feel different to people of different economic status. I guess it’s tough to feel the individual side of that.
I enjoyed the first few seasons of Star Trek Discovery (another reason for me to get downvotes lol). It was on Netflix in my country and then shortly before a new season was due to start CBS pulled it for their own platform. It wasn’t even available for months. I was disappointed but I’ve never seen the newer episodes. I really appreciate your reasoning and don’t judge you for it, I just personally feel that I won’t buy a product if I don’t like the box it comes in etc.