You are allowed to discuss piracy. You aren’t allowed to facilitate piracy (I.e. providing links to pirated content). It is illegal in the country where this instance is hosted.

Defederating cuts off the whole instance. They just blocked those three piracy communities as far as I understand.

Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.

A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can’t police beyond blocking the community / instance.

There is no point to linking communities- if they are going to have identical content, just pick one or the other.

A better option would be for cross posts (using the Lemmy cross post feature) to exist as a single entity that is visible in multiple communities. This would allow for some differences in moderation which is the justifiable reason for multiple communities on the same topic in the first place.

Huh, don’t know what that was about. Edited.

Somebody might be getting a nasty AWS bill at the end of the month.

I can’t claim to know what the designers intended, but having users spread across a large numbers of servers is terribly inefficient for how Lemmy works: each server maintains a copy of each community that it’s users are subscribed to, and changes to those communities need to be communicated across each of those instances.

Given this architecture, it is much more efficient and robust to have users concentrate on what are effectively high performance cacheing servers, and communities spread out on smaller, interest focused instances.

Why do people insist that there needs to be (for example) /c/politics on every instance? Really, there are only 3 or 4 with any substantial traffic, and there are good reasons to pick one over the others, and they are the same good reasons for them to be separate.

There is a cross post feature, and the resuting post appears to be aware it was cross posted - it would be nice if Lemmy would consolidate those to one post that appears in multiple communities, or at least show you only one of them.

There are also new “top” options, and really “new” isn’t a bad option.

but as a user it seems that switching from WebSocket created/shined a light on Lemmy’s issues with caching in general.

Or just adding actual error messages instead of ignoring them and throwing up a spinning wheel.

The point of the fediverse is that hosts can pick their own business model - free, freemium, ad-supported, subscription. Just like e-mail, you sign up with the provider who provides the type of service you think best meets your needs. If they piss you off, you move to a different provider.

If the fediverse demands hosting for millions of users, someone will make a server to host millions.

I personally think “big” instances should focus on user/identity management, while communities live in small groups on small instances. This lets the identity providers include/exclude with much better granularity (compared to the beehaw mess) making the communities much less susceptible to being collateral damage.