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.

https://lemmy.world/post/3234363

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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      8 months ago

      Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It’s 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that’s not exactly great for a piracy community either.

      Image loading example

      I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could’ve been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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          8 months ago

          I’m not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don’t know about this.

          The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that’s not implemented.

          Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I’m not sure why this feature was removed again. I can’t find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you’re curious.

        • nutsack@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          you could safeguard against this on the client side by not loading images from untrusted sources. irc clients did this

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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          8 months ago

          Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.

      • nutsack@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        i really wish there were a way to disable images with some of these fancy lemmy clients for android. I’m not interested in any of them

      • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Ok so we have basically created a reddit with extra retardation and uploaded to a blockchain.

      • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?

          • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Copyright laws are actually very difficult to enforce when it comes to digital piracy. You have to prove loss of profit among other things.

            Then, who do you sue? The person downloading the product? The person hosting the product? The person providing a link to the hosted data? The person providing a platform for people to link things? The person who allows their platform to federate with another platform that does?

            If we’re talking about P2P sharing, then in a way no one is hosting the data.

            In Australia when the Dallas Buyers Club case was being looked at, the studio was asking for a lot of money. Basically a big fat fine to be paid. The judge threw it out saying that the only reasonable damages for one person to pay would be the cost of the DVD because that was the value of the “theft”.

            • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              You dont have to enforce it.

              You just have to drown people in legal bills and force them into compliance with risk of bankruptcy.

                • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Ah yes, the pirate bay, the first stop for anyone wanting to download a file thats probably a virus.

                  Also they have lost lawsuits in the past and had fines levied against them and had property seized, so they arent as immune as you think.

              • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                I don’t know enough about law to know how that does or does not work, but it that’s possible then any entity with enough money can actively bankrupt anyone they want, and it won’t have anything to do with why. If that’s true could you not just sue someone by making stuff up and force them to prove you made it up?

          • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Comments like this sound like the “they write it off on tax” comments, where there’s this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can’t work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.