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.
Lemmy.world continues to prove that their biggest utility is in attracting the bulk of the Reddit Crowd so that other, more specialized communities aren’t overwhelmed, and the older worlders can then join a better community for the long-run.
But r/piracy is still an thing. Crazy.
And it’s a shell of it’s former self. A lot of the serious members switched to c/piracy, db0 being the prime example