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

  • Sandbag
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    71 year ago

    The question we should all be asking is why did the defederate?

  • Admiral Patrick
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy world:

    Users, not even on Lemmy World or directly affected by this:

    Pissed Pikachu with torch and pitchfork

    I’m not in the loop or even involved with LW’s admin affairs, but I would imagine there was a letter or email to them or their service provider that prompted that and likely named those communities specifically. Going out on a limb, I would guess the community removal was a timely response to something like that, and based on LW’s history, an announcement will probably be coming soon-ish.

    Before you grab your torches and pitchforks, remember: Pretty much every Lemmy instance is run by volunteers that don’t have legal departments.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      People speaking out and getting mad is natural and helpful. It’s how discourse works at this scale. Maybe the mods change their actions or maybe they don’t, but saying nothing about bad things happening won’t help anyone and getting mad that others are saying things is stupid.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Evidence No. 3783 that “social media” and “privacy” do not mix well together.

      Let me repeat one more time:

      • anything you write online should be considered public.
      • There is no “consent-based” fediverse.
      • There is no “GDPR protects me from that”.
      • There is no “security through obscurity”.
      • There is no “dark corner of the internet”.

      No matter your morals and ethical values, If you need to have any type of conversation that you think might get you in legal trouble, do not have this conversation in a public forum. Use #matrix if you have to, and even then you’d still need to worry large group chats which may have some undercover agent.

      And if you are really concerned about “censorship”, then ActivityPub is not for you. Go join forces with the bitcoiners and use #nostr.

      • JohnEdwa
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        And anything you write or upload to Lemmy should be considered permanent, as it immediately spreads throughout all the instances and they actually don’t have to respect edits or removals. And if instances defederate from each other then they simply can’t, as they don’t sync those requests any more - if Lemmy.World decided to defederate from Sopuli, this message would become permanent and I could not do anything about it.

        Also, this who saga about the uploaded ID picture.

      • @[email protected]
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        201 year ago

        Oh oops, you haven’t pasted some cool copyleft licence below your words on this niche thread on a niche social media network so looks like I might remix and reuse your content without attribution… Unlucky

        • Scrubbles
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          81 year ago

          ZUCKERBERG HAS NO LEGAHL AUTHROITEE YO MY UPLOADS I RETAIN ALL OWNERSHIP FOR EVERYTHING.

        • Draconic NEO
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          21 year ago

          I think you got the wrong person, the copyright guy is someone else.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            I’ve seen a few people doing it, but I (and literally any companies scraping instances for content) just lol and move on.

            • Draconic NEO
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              21 year ago

              I feel like I’ve only seen one, maybe two people doing it, but I guess there might’ve been more.

        • @[email protected]
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          61 year ago

          Not at all. I myself have been playing with the possibility of adding support to it on Fediverser, to have a place for the mirror bots.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      “The cloud is just other people’s computers” - It’s inconvenient, but those computers are real, physical objects subject to oversight from real, physical law enforcement.

      • Scrubbles
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        241 year ago

        “but it’s not my computer, so you should be willing to host any of it”

    • @[email protected]OP
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      1 year ago

      The thing that gets me is the quote in the OP from last time this happened. It has been +12 hours of silence when you said last time they’d have this discussion BEFORE. Maybe it’s for legal reasons but you’d think they’d have said well, something.

    • Count Regal Inkwell
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      Yeah like.

      This isn’t reddit dot com opaquely purging your favourite subreddit for some unspecific corporate reason.

      The admins stated quite clearly why they are blocking it (“we don’t want trouble, and our TOS lay out that we’ll defed from illegal shit for our own safety”), and it is their instance. And unlike Reddit – The community is still THERE in its home server. It has not been burninated. – You can just. Make an account elsewhere. It’s free. It takes less than 5 minutes. You can even KEEP your LW account for other communities.

      • @[email protected]
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        151 year ago

        Did the admins state anything? I thought the issue here is that LW previously did something without an announcement, undid it and promised to communicate before doing something like that again, and now people are saying they haven’t communicated this time.

        That’s the real issue, not the fact that it was defederated.

    • Neuromancer
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      841 year ago

      Remember: Pretty much every Lemmy instance is run by volunteers that don’t have legal departments

      One lawsuit can shut them down.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Never understood people who don’t get this.

        As a person who is part of open source communities, on various chairs and donates, the money is extremely slim, and the people involved just want to build cool things.

        We are busy trying to keep the lights on for hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy this service. And if a small group of troublemakers force us to get a strong legal threat, we aren’t risking the the project’s survival for them.

        Especially when we don’t know the troublemakers, don’t have any connection with them, they don’t contribute to the platform, etc.

    • @[email protected]
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      221 year ago

      Are you telling me Reddit is free to have a Piracy sub, but Lemmy isn’t?

      What’s the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        You know the meme where Bender goes, “I’ll do my own thing, with Blackjack and hookers!”

        Lemme provides that. Servers are managed by different groups and you can absolutely make your own, with blackjacks and hookers.

      • @[email protected]
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        461 year ago

        You seem to be confusing Lemmy.world with Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy is free to be used for anything by anyone.

        Lemmy.world is the largest and most mainstream Lemmy server, so they need to be especially careful about legal issues. If lemmy.world gets taken down due to mirroring content hosted on lemmy.dbzer0.com, the whole network would partially collapse because of how many users and communities are hosted on lemmy.world.

        It’s not even close to worth the risk. This is how federation is supposed to work.

          • @[email protected]
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            121 year ago

            I’m not from lemmy.world, I’m from sh.itjust.works. We have never banned you at all. And I understand your argument.

            But it’s not our place to decide what the lemmy.world admins do with their server. It also doesn’t affect you personally at all. It’s not like they defederated your server, it only affects their users who were subscribed to that community, and they can always just make an account on another server.

          • @[email protected]
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            121 year ago

            It’s definitely not ideal to be this centralized around lemmy.world. But it’s also nearly impossible to prevent some amount of centralization, especially at our current size. With only 50k active users, we don’t have enough people to sustain activity if things were more spread out.

            It’s still so early. If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized. A year ago, about 70-80% of the whole network was basically centralized on lemmy.ml. I dont have the exact numbers because I wasn’t here yet, but looking back at the stats there were only a few thousand active users at that time and the vast majority were on lemmy.ml

            Now, only about 40% of the network is on lemmy.world (20k/50k users). I just think there are natural incentives that will continue to push us in the direction of decentralization, but we haven’t quite reached the tipping point where that starts to happen.

            • @[email protected]
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              101 year ago

              If we get to 500k or 5M users, things will naturally get way more decentralized.

              What makes you think that? I abandoned my kbin account because all the content is on lemmy and I don’t feel like waiting 4 hours to get that content on kbin. People will go where the content is.

              • @[email protected]
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                That’s just because kbin doesn’t work properly though. One reason why things are centralized is because there are only so many servers that actually work well.

                Events like this removal of the piracy community will naturally cause people to spread out over time. You could even see people try to spread out on reddit by making new subs when they chafed at the rules.

                The more people we have, the more diverse we will become, and thus it will be necessary to create new servers to accommodate these different types of people. That’s my instinct, but there are many different ways it could go.

                • @[email protected]
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                  31 year ago

                  Content loads just as fast on small subs as on large subs. Not so for instances. I think centralization is inevitable unless federated data transfer gets faster.

            • deweydecibel
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              61 year ago

              Centralization is a product of social behavior. People will gravitate to the place everyone else is. They won’t “decentralize” naturally.

              • @[email protected]
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                31 year ago

                Sometimes people centralize, and sometimes they decentralize. They are both natural social behaviors.

                If people naturally gravitate to the place everyone is, why are we all on Lemmy instead of reddit? Why do I have absolutely no desire to be a part of lemmy.world, where everyone else is? People are not all the same.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        Reddit is an American company, subject to American laws, that has a legal department (i.e. has lawyers on retainer). Lemmy World, like most other instances, is run by volunteers and donations and is subject to the laws where it’s hosted and/or where its operators reside.

        When you receive a takedown / DMCA / whatever legal mumbo-jumbo applies to your jurisdiction, you have two choices:

        • Comply immediately
        • Fight it in court

        The first option is free. The second option costs a lot of money if you don’t already have lawyers on retainer and can cost even more money if the court rules against you.

        Sucks, but that’s the way it is.

        Again, I’m only speculating that was the case here. However, given Germany is one of the jurisdictions LW is accountable to, it’s not that wild of a guess.

        In most EU nations, piracy is usually not even a blip on the radar for security forces and internet providers. Things seem to work completely differently in Germany, where breaking copyright law can carry a sentence of up to three years in jail, alongside a large fine and trial costs. - Source


        What’s the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?

        That’s such a broad question that I’m not even going to bother. Instead, I’ll answer with the same question as when “states’ rights” are brought up:

        States’ rights Free to do what, exactly?”

        You’re also free to run your own instance and accept all the legal liabilities that come with that.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 year ago

          When you receive a takedown / DMCA / whatever legal mumbo-jumbo applies to your jurisdiction, you have two choices:

          Comply immediately
          Fight it in court
          

          You actually have a third option: file a DMCA Counternotice. If my reading is correct, the very act of filing the counternotice allows you to keep the content up unless the original filer “insists” (it’s the mechanism against “DMCA trolling”). DMCAis not a jail-free card to erase content from the internet.

          • Admiral Patrick
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            Possibly, but the DMCA is strictly a US thing. The comply or fight in court are the only two somewhat universal options.

            Other countries have other similar laws, though. LW’s TOS says they’re under legal jurisdiction of Finland, The Netherlands, and Germany. Not sure what their laws are like, but Germany seems pretty strict about it.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 year ago

              Could be, but still it reeks of overreaction. Without the need of seeing anything else, it’s almost impossible that Germany’s law is that strict that “linking to (discussion of) pirated material” would be off, since if that was the case Google would be making Germany rich with their fines, which doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s even worse when it comes down to saying “discussing or mentioning” internet piracy would be illegal - under the way copyright holders themselves understand it, this would mean mentioning the market of secondhand sales would be illegal in such jurisdictions.

              • Admiral Patrick
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                Yeah, until LW addresses it, all we can really do is guess. I’ve just jumped to the most logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s even close.

                For what it’s worth, as an instance admin myself: I don’t get paid to run it, I have other things to worry about, and most definitely don’t have time or energy to deal with copyright BS. That said, I can completely understand their position and reaction.

                Depending on how my day was going, I’d have also probably “shot first and asked questions later” with regard to removing the community and waiting until I had time to compose a post about it and be present to deal with the inevitable drama that would cause.

                Hopefully they make an announcement soon.

      • HACKthePRISONS
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        201 year ago

        the dbzer0 piracy community has been around much longer than most of the users here. they spun up when they saw the writing on the wall, and they permit things that would not be permitted on reddit. and, it seems, they permit things that are not permitted on .world.

        but the instance is still there. the community is still there.

        and you can leave .world, join an instance that hasn’t banned !piracy, and keep right on going.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          You don’t even need to leave .world, you can subscribe to communities on other instances.

    • GreatAlbatross
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      This is precisely it.
      One other point is, some instance want to focus on certain things, and take the risks, where others don’t.
      Our community feddit.uk doesn’t do nsfw, because it’s not worth the headache for what our main focus is.
      The guy running lemmynsfw on the other hand, is enthusiastically embracing the challenges involved, and more power to him!

      And in the end, it works. We handle Mr. Brains Pork Balls, they can handle…other balls.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        71 year ago

        Our community feddit.uk doesn’t do nsfw, because it’s not worth the headache for what our main focus is.

        Same for my instance and for the same reasons. We have nothing against that, just, like you said, not our focus nor worth the headache.

        And in the end, it works. We handle Mr. Brains Pork Balls, they can handle…other balls.

        🤣

    • @[email protected]
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      141 year ago

      I would imagine there was a letter or email to them or their service provider that prompted that and likely named those communities specifically

      What I’m curious about is, why haven’t lemmy.dbzer0.com received those takedown messages? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the source instead of just another instance hosting the content but not actually “responsible” for the content, so to speak? Or maybe they have?

      Also curious why lemmy.world has still not made a statement about this or even acknowledged it (at least I haven’t seen any acknowledgement so far). Removing the communities from their instance is of course totally within their power and right, but this isn’t exactly the most transparent way to do it.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        141 year ago

        What I’m curious about is, why haven’t lemmy.dbzer0.com received those takedown messages? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the source instead of just another instance hosting the content but not actually “responsible” for the content, so to speak? Or maybe they have?

        So many unknowns. Until LW makes an announcement, it’s all speculation. I haven’t seen any mention from db0 about takedowns, etc, but those may just be background noise for him. lol

        • @[email protected]
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          91 year ago

          Db0 seems confused based on their comments about this situation over on the piracy community. Said there was zero notice or communication from LW ahead of time

          • Admiral Patrick
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            21 year ago

            I don’t know the inner politics of it, but I did check lemmy.world/instances and db0 wasn’t on the “blocked” list. AFAIK, based on their modlog, just those two communities were blocked (unless that’s changed since i last looked)

            • @[email protected]
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              51 year ago

              Yeah something’s going on. As of 10 hours ago Db0 has no idea what exactly that is though, which is odd because I believe typically LW would reach out to him about the offending content if it was a DMCA type thing. Idk

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        regarding your first question - they usually go after the big fish first. dbzer0 might still be flying under the radar, and also might be ina different jurisdiction where the specific plaintiff can’t go after them, or where it’s harder for them to do so

    • @[email protected]
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      121 year ago

      So start your own instance, with Blackjack and hookers?

      As expected that’s the power of Lemmy!

  • @[email protected]
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    391 year ago

    Sad that antipiracy laws are in place.

    But understandable that lemmy.world protect themselves against those unfair laws.

    The sailing will continue, but, as always, we should be wary of the “navy” and sail with precaution.

  • Scrubbles
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    1181 year ago

    ITT: People who think lemmy.world is equal to Lemmy.

    Go join another instance folks.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    Well this comment section was an interesting read. Interesting how many comments still bend the discussion towards bashing lemmy.ml and defederating from it. People, it’s not even the topic of this post?

    Also it seems like very few actually read the post beyond the title? The problem is not lemmy.world banning the piracy community, they have the right to do so, that’s how federation works. The problem is them making a promise to make announcements about such bans in advance, but they instead did it quietly in the background again.

        • haui
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          131 year ago

          Same here. I discuss a lot with .ml and besides dumping on capitalism a lot (and rightfully so), I havent seen anything supporting this claim either.

      • @[email protected]
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        I just searched “china”, and didn’t notice any authoritarian propaganda in the first 3 pages, but I counted 6 anti-chinese stories.

        The closest to pro-chinese stories that came up were that EU citizens can now travel to China visa-free, the CEO of evergrande getting fined and banned from business, and some news story about economic numbers.

        Would you care to point it out to me?

        • @[email protected]
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          141 year ago

          Propaganda isn’t obvious like that, and the core of most propaganda is truthful. Generally speaking you need to look at the big picture and what key actors want to be able to see probable propaganda.

          They’ll never say “the CCP is great and Taiwanese people don’t deserve freedom,” but they undermine people who would defend Taiwan and help shape things so an attack is more likely to succeed (e.g., supporting the Kremlin’s attack on Ukrainians).

          Not really interested in discussing it more with a Lemmy.ml user. I’ve seen too much bad faith engagement and don’t want to waste my time. Apologies if you’re actually sincere.

    • @[email protected]
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      231 year ago

      and federates with everyone world federates with

      Not entirely true, I discovered the other day, while helping someone figure out why they couldn’t access .ml communities, that .ml blocks furry instances…

        • @[email protected]
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          121 year ago

          Yiffit.net, ani.social, and lemmynsfw.com. Those are the main defederations that I think are a little harsh.

          Aside from those, most of the other blocked instances are pretty egregious (mostly pedophilia and alt-right) and SJW has blocked many of the same ones.

          The only major server with less defederation is Lemm.ee.

            • @[email protected]
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              61 year ago

              Idk about ani.social but the other two are. Ani.social has a general anime discussion community that was created as a replacement for the anime community on lemmy.ml and has rapidly surpassed it in activity. You’re not allowed to link [email protected] on lemmy.ml either.

              Lemmy.ml admins would argue they host loli/pedo content, but ani.social would argue it’s just mainstream anime content and it’s part of the genre. I don’t really know more than that, but I think it’s a bit unfair to describe the whole ani.social server as being used for porn.

            • @[email protected]
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              51 year ago

              ani social was anime related, but the admins banned it because they dont really like anime and just tag reasons for censorship as loli, without evidence of it. I dont even actively contribute to the anime community, but was the driving reason why i moved from ml to zip. didnt want to have to deal with unsubstantial censorship with an actual valid reason.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                On the other hand, I really would not be surprised if they did have banworthy content on there.

                • @[email protected]
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                  im not doubting the possibility, but not to even provide evidence to the servers admins is a red flag on pushing the ml dev/admins agendas without being transparent about it.

                  without a level of transparency, the same reason can be used to unjustfully ban anything.

        • AceCephalon
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          41 year ago

          Hi, here’s your pretty much useless furry check.

          Double meaning entirely intentional, because funny.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      lemmy ml de-federates with communites and instances without even a reason, not to say that their moderations actions weren’t questionable in the past and present.

      • Armok: God of Blood
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        Should read the ToS of LW (your instance):

        The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:

        • The Netherlands
        • Republic of Finland
        • Federal Republic of Germany
  • NutWrench
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    221 year ago

    The pirates will simply move to another Lemmy Instance and re-create the group there. This is the advantage of having a decentralized platform: so one person or small group of people can’t ruin things for the rest of us.

  • Handles
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    871 year ago

    This is why you don’t sign up with the biggest possible instances, eventually they will become the biggest possible bottleneck in a network. Anything dot world admins do will affect all of their users, that shouldn’t be surprising 🤷

    As for dbzer0, this might affect users in the short term but eventually people will figure out how to access the sub from more friendly instances.