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.
I don’t know the inner politics of it, but I did check lemmy.world/instances and db0 wasn’t on the “blocked” list. AFAIK, based on their modlog, just those two communities were blocked (unless that’s changed since i last looked)
Yeah something’s going on. As of 10 hours ago Db0 has no idea what exactly that is though, which is odd because I believe typically LW would reach out to him about the offending content if it was a DMCA type thing. Idk