feel free to reach out to me directly via matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world if you want
edit: fyi, mentions of @[email protected] will usually not be seen.
so far this has been a single case with kbin.earth and lots and lots of cases with kbin.social.
no other instances have been observed behaving like this yet.
maybe I misunderstood your comment, I read your Texas AG example as asking for information about users. did you mean Texas AG asking for the removal of comments where people are stating they're trans?
as I'm very tired right now, I only want to comment on one of the arguments/questions you brought up.
you're asking for the difference between taking down content and providing information about users.
its very simple actually. sharing non-public data is a very different story than removing access to otherwise public information, whether it's originally coming from Lemmy.World or elsewhere.
when we take down content, even if it's more than legally strictly necessary, the harm of such a takedown is at most someone no longer being able to consume other content or interact with a community. there is no irreversible harm done to anyone. if we decided to reinstate the community, then everyone would still be able to do the same thing they were able to do in the beginning. the only thing people may be missing out on would be some time and convenience.
if we were asked to provide information, such as your example of a Texas AG, this would neither be reversible nor have low impact on people's lives. in my opinion, these two cases., despite both having a legal context, couldn't be much further from each other.
We do question the validity of claims, but when it comes to takedowns of copyright related content, we simply do not have the resources to throw money at lawyers to evaluate this in detail. We can apply common sense to determine if something appears to be a reasonable request, but we can't pay a lawyer to evaluate every single request. We also can't afford going to court over every case, even if we were to win, because those processes take large amounts of personal time and have a risk of significant penalties.
Legal advocates on Lemmy or any other platform for that matter are not a substitution for legal council.
What would be the alternative?
Moving the instance behind Tor and hoping to never get identified?
As long as you're operating a service on the internet you'll be bound by laws in one place or another. The only thing you can do against this is trying to avoid being identified and therefore trying to evade prosecution. This is not a legal defense.
Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.
If we get a request, of course we will evaluate that request.
When it comes to taking down content, such as copyright infringing content, we may err on the side of caution to reduce the legal risk we're exposing ourselves to.
When it comes to handing over data that is not already publicly accessible, such as (not-really-)private messages or IP addresses of users, we will not "err on the side of caution" and hand out data to everyone, but we must follow the laws that we're operating under. See also https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/#4-when-and-with-whom-do-we-share-your-personal-information.
Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.
if being gay became illegal in NL for example, and there would be laws to prevent talking about gay people, then we'd have to either no longer tolerate such content on our platform or ensure we're no longer bound by dutch laws.
The execution should have been better, but the decision itself was a team decision, not an individual admin decision without talking to the rest of the team.
it's not just this community getting hit.
it's mostly [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected], though some of the latest spam also started arriving in [email protected]
