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.
It’s not as easy as moderating individual posts. Remember, Lemmy is decentralized. If you start your own Lemmy server and I federated with it, I’ll get all the stuff you post on my instance too (intentionally oversimplified).
Its up to you to moderate communities on your instance the way you see fit, and up to me to moderate mine. Even though our instances are federated, I can’t moderate on your behalf. It just isn’t feasible both in terms of the technology and in terms of the sheer volume of content you would have to try to moderate.
If you have a community that posts a mix of things I agree with and things I don’t, I really only have a couple options on my end. Basically I can block that community on my instance or block your instance altogether.
The reason why someone might block a community may be more about the legal risk than any moral justification. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to even host that information. And since Lemmy instances cache posts from other instances, it could be argued that because that community is federated with your instance, you’re responsible for the content posted there.
That’s all well and good, I agree with virtually all you said. It’s certainly the admins’ right to block or de-federate any community they want, based on risk or just because they feel like it, I have no issue with that. It’s simply my personal belief that discussion of crime is not a crime. Direct links to illegal content should not be allowed, but discussion about piracy in general should carry no more risk that learning about murder in a criminology class, which does not need to be banned just because it’s teaching people things they could in theory use to get away with murder.