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.
I can see why they would do this if their servers are in the US, Japan, Germany or another country with insane copyright laws. If not this move is stupid, almost as stupid as hosting your server in one of those countries.
Neither the server or community host copyrighted content. You can’t even directly link to sources for it either per the community and server rules. All the community does is discuss piracy which isn’t illegal
True, but let’s not forget that Lemmy instances are hosted by ordinary people without the finances to employ high price legal teams. If they receive a threatening letter from (for example) Sony or Disney they still have to either acquiesce or find a lot of money very quickly to simply argue their case.
In the US you can apparently sue software companies that make software sometimes used for piracy so it apparently doesn’t even need to be illegal there for people to shut it down if they are rich enough.