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.
And anything you write or upload to Lemmy should be considered permanent, as it immediately spreads throughout all the instances and they actually don’t have to respect edits or removals. And if instances defederate from each other then they simply can’t, as they don’t sync those requests any more - if Lemmy.World decided to defederate from Sopuli, this message would become permanent and I could not do anything about it.
Also, this who saga about the uploaded ID picture.
removing pictures really seems like a bit of a nightmare after reading that.