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 doubt there will be a statement on the shrooms one as it was a niche community, with far less outcry than the piracy ones.
Also to all the people sticking up for lemmy.world and saying the ones bothered by this should just leave without a fuss. If it wouldn’t have been for the people who were and still are being vocal you likely wouldn’t even have had this announcement or transparency (which is what many of them were vocal about), and the mistake wouldn’t have been realized, they’d just keep posting updates to the discord and left us here on the service in the dark about announcements, so would you rather have a people complain when something was done wrong and badly and get transparency or would you rather be left in the dark to wonder why something was done or happened.