Brickfrog

Definitely I could see this being useful for discussing things that would traditionally be censored on other more centralized or semi-decentralized platforms (piracy, anti-authoritarian discussions in an oppressive country, etc).

IPFS by default isn’t set up to work around censorship or anything of the sort. Protocol Labs (creator/maintainer of IPFS and Filecoin) have always honored copyright takedowns, etc. on their own infrastructure and have done a fair amount of work on content blocking within the default IPFS clients and such.

e.g. https://blog.ipfs.tech/2023-content-blocking-for-the-ipfs-stack

Not sure about SIM cards but you can still use cash to buy prepaid phones along with an amount of minutes/text to activate. Like the kind of prepaid phones that you you see the vendors sell x minutes/text/data. e.g. I’ve never been asked for a credit card to buy a Tracfone. Some places like Best Buy will ask you for other information to sell it but none of it needs to be real (ironically Best Buy asks for a phone number to buy a prepaid phone, LOL). You do need to set up a Tracfone account online to actually activate a phone + plan, not sure about the other prepaid vendors.

Banning piracy? Like the mere encouragement or?

Just the mere encouragement & discussion, yes. The banned communities do not allow direct links to pirated content (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a rule forbidding that).

It’s strange to see people saying there was some sort of legit reasoning, the lemmy.world admins did not receive any sort of legal DMCA/NTD request or anything of the sort. They were simply trolled hard by a brand new account from lemm.ee asking to defederate from “piracy” communities and lemmy.world admins took the bait. See the post yourself https://lemmy.world/post/3175920

Incidentally that same user has created troll accounts at other instances & have been getting themselves banned, they were already banned at the dbzer0 instance (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/1956277) so it looks like it was simple retaliation to attempt to trick other instances into defederating/blocking them.