I get where they’re coming from too. I guess they just want to avoid any potential issues. That being said, the recent piracy issue reddit faced where companies tried to get reddit to reveal some users’ IPs for saying they torrented a movie is a good example that talking about piracy is not inherently illegal, as long as they weren’t actually sharing the files on the site.

A possible solution is continue federation but not allow caching and have users browse content from the community directly, so there’s no liability of having the content on .world servers. That’s resource intensive and might need major lemmy code changes though.

Also, as others mentioned, it seems this was started by a troll who was being petty and claimed the community is rule-breaking, and the admins were easily spooked.