It's the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.

• Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
• Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
• New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
• Community becomes "popular" enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
• New users flood in
• Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
• Community now sucks.

It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.

Because the people who tend to care the most about stuff like what Reddit is doing or about having a long-term community moved here; whereas the people who just wanted a quick and easy way to learn how to download warez stayed behind.

I don't even mean that in a critical way (a lot of us started out like them, and there's a limit to the number of things people can care about anyway) but that's more-or-less what it is. The people who came here are the ones who care more about piracy in-and-of itself and who often have ideological or philosophical reasons to support it; and they tend to be the ones who make the most interesting posts.

We have more freedom here, don't have to worry about stepping on any corporate toes. Also the viewership is a lot smaller and the people that are here are more interested in actual information and discussion. I don't think that will change a huge amount, but as the platform grows we may see more shitposts.

Also it takes a little more effort to deal with the decentralized platform here. It kind of weeds out the user base. I mean I've been astonished by the lack of effort seen in some Reddit posts. For example posting a question that can be answered straight away with a simple search.

I think a lot of it stemmed from the sub always living in fear of being closed/banned by Reddit's admins.

Because all the cool kids came here ;)

I think the early days of /r/piracy was pretty good. I learned a lot from it and found many guides and how to. But then it got popular and everyone started flooding in and asked every single little thing instead of reading the wiki and quality went bad.

I think it won't get to that on Lemmy because those who don't read the wiki won't read to understand the fediverse.

Reddit’s algorithm has slowly deprioritized text-based content over time. I moderate a large discussion sub and our view counts have slowly declined over the past ten years, with the biggest drop happening when the redesign released. Discussion did happen on /r/piracy, but you had to go to the subreddit and sort by new.

Probably because Reddit never really liked "non-adversing friendly" subs. Reddit tolerated them, because it did drive users to the platform. However, there was a fine line between "acceptable piracy" talk vs the ban hammer.

On Lemmy, we have admins who aren't fixated on "the users are the product" and advertisers... So, we can let our guard down and have meaningful discussions.

Welcome to the fediverse!

Communities rise or fall with the people in them, especially those who contribute and less those who lurk.

Piracy communities are typically made up of people who are used to being shattered to rebuild elsewhere, so it makes sense that this would be one of those who have less trouble moving.

Because I don't feel spied here. Here I feel safe man

This community also needs to ban random memes.

We couldn't talk about real digital piracy anymore after seeing so many subs that were acceptable early in Reddit's lifespan get taken down, some deserved, some not.

Having our own server based sub is extremely beneficial and this particular community was lucky that this event occurred. If anyone would like to talk about PC Gaming in a piracy friendly environment, checkout !pcgaming@lemmy.fmhy.ml

reddit was always heavily moderated for real piracy discussion, I believe

Normies eventually ruin everything.

Because piracy isn’t legal. For anything that can run afoul of the law, or bad publicity, or advertisers’ preferences, Reddit admins have to keep the content on a tight leash. Lemmy doesn’t have advertisers to worry about as it’s supported directly by users, and not being a for-profit company makes it somewhat harder for the law to come down on it (and if they do, the community can easily move). Really, it’s a fundamental advantage of federation.

As a corporate entity Reddit had much more liability to worry about and more to lose.

Part of the appeal of the fediverse is that any of us anywhere can run an instance with different stakes, applicable laws, etc.

Without having to worry about profit, conversations can flourish.

I could be wrong, but I think Reddit’s sitewide rules frown on discussions of piracy. Doesn’t look good to advertisers, I assume.

I only base this on many subreddits having rules against discussing how to find pirated content.

Number of users and popularity. Plus not being able to seriously discuss it on reddit due to them potentially banning the sub.

I'm excited for Lemmy and other federated communities, because it allows places to stay smaller while still sharing posts and comments. That should help stop the effect of a single community getting super high traffic. Plus there is no karma/score so there's less incentive to spam low effort posts.

I think it's because only the best pirates came over to lemmy.

I have learned so much in just this month from lemmy piracy posts. Keep'em coming! Rrrr!