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Survivability of an r/Megalinks community on Lemmy (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Since we are all pirates moving away from Lemmy I was thinking if another r/Megalinks style community could be made on Lemmy and survive? (Or pehaps already exists?)

For those that don't know Reddit pirate history, r/megalinks was a sub where people shared links to megaupload usually for files for download. It was a very unique hub and usually had some rare stuff that downloaded quickly thanks to the uploaded service not being p2p. I actually still have a full back up of it that I'll check for stuff I can't find and they'll still be working.

But as Reddit got bigger posts kept getting hit with takedown requests until Reddit itself got sick of it and banned the community. Eventually the community there made Snahp, which is very good but it's private status makes it feel a bit small compared to the old megalinks sub in terms of available options.

Posting links is sort of a strange grey area, even more so than torrent hosting, But idk what the reality of having a community like that would be. Sure an instance owner can say "I won't care" but if it gets too big and the MPAA starts getting pissy, it might not be worth it to them. But with Lemmy's growth and services like Debrid existing now, it would be better than torrenting for the most part. (I also use UseNet yes, but it's not great for old or aging content)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But idk what the reality of having a community like that would be

Interesting question since there's no precedent.

If a copyright troll were to go after links on the Fediverse, what would they do. I guess they'd have to target the owner of the instance that hosts the community. If you set up an instance on a VPS that doesn't care, like those that offer seedboxes and debrid services I guess they'd just get ignored. I suppose they could go after other instances and force them to block the offending instance, I don't know.

To set up a community like that, probably best on its own instance using a copyright resistant VPS. Would keep it insulated. It could get blocked by other instances, but should be possible to create local a sign-in for direct access.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think this is the best approach. We don't want direct download links here (see rule 3) for exactly this reason. We want to be able to serve as a pirate community in the long term without having to play whack-a-mole with hosting providers and domain names every few months, to say nothing of the legal risk. But I would expect we would be able to add such an instance to the Megathread if the mod team liked the idea, so it's at arms length from this instance. 👍

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

MEGA itself does respond to valid DMCA notices; just as an FYI. I don't consider MEGA to be all that copyright resistant.

However; it's likely to be usable if long lived links were zippped using a specific password to encrypt. It's either that and/or links be ephemerally generated for a week at a time for requests.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We don’t want direct download links here (see rule 3)

What if all the links were encoded?