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.
EDIT: dbzer0 had nothing to do with this ban, it was done by a Lemmy.World admin.
I updated my post after another user stated that it wasn’t lemmy.world admins that performed the ban but the db0 team that did. I can’t say with certainty that’s actually the case since the modlog is pretty opaque and I don’t have full knowledge of how [federated] actions are propagated & displayed.I (incorrectly?) assumed since those communities had existed for so long on the dbzer0 instance they had at least tacit approval from the admins there and were in communication with them enough that a full ban wouldn’t occur – when I saw the removal in the modlog I didn’t even consider that possibility.Sorry for kicking up drama here if the Lemmy.World team had no part in this :(When you check the mod logs and filter by mod you can see that it came from Mr. Kaplan which is a lemmy.world admin.
So yes it was a lemmy.world decision. The question is whether or not this admin was a lone actor.
Here is the modlog: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveCommunity
Seems to have been made by a mod from LW indeed
Sigh… if “indirectly linking” is prohibited then literally the entire web breaks.