Why unacceptable? As the runner of an instance I get to have control over my own little walled garden - it’s literally the primary strength of federation. If anyone, at any time, is unhappy with the content moderation policies of the admins of their Mastodon/Calckey/Peertube/Lemmy/kbin instance then they are able to find a new home - or maybe start one of their own, like dbzer0 did.
Oh sure, let’s go to Reddit to talk about Lemmy
Who is going to pay for the legal fees if the admins get sued?
There were no legal issues or threats, it was just some troll with a brand new account from a different instance that tricked admins into blocking those communities. See the other post https://lemmy.world/post/3175920 (if it loads, lemmy.world having uptime issues as usual)
Most rational people choose to limit their exposure to liability before it happens rather than increase their exposure to liability and wait around to later have to defend themselves.
Are you suggesting the proper course is to maximize your exposure to liability and then be forced to defend yourself later?
Most rational people choose to limit their exposure to liability before it happens
I had a feeling someone was going to reply with the “let’s ban things because they might be problematic in the future” reasoning. What’s interesting with your line of thinking is that there are many more communities that Lemmy.world admins should also consider banning due to possibly being a legal issue later on. In fact Lemmy.world admins haven’t even banned all piracy related/adjacent communities, they literally only considered the select few that were mentioned by the troll account.
I’d argue with this action Lemmy.world admins have actually put themselves in a more legally dubious position. They are now picking and choosing which sorts of liability to be exposed to. There is now historical precedence that the Lemmy.world admins specifically choose what to keep unblocked on their instance.
But it isn’t that it might be problematic in the future, it’s very likely that it will. Look at what happened with RIAA and youtube-dl, reddit and film studios. The movie and music industries are very trigger happy when it comes to suing anyone even remotely related to piracy.
Also picking and choosing which sorts of liability you’re exposed to is normal, it isn’t an all or nothing situation.
