So, as a moderator for !manga@ani.social, I have been trying to keep tabs on how this has been developing over on reddit (especially /r/manga).
I believe that if a publisher were to request content or posts to be removed, it would most likely be directed to the instance admin. In my community's case, that would be @hitagi@ani.social. It would then be up to them whether to or how to remove the content. If it isn't a formal DMCA or if they are in a jurisdiction not bound by the DMCA, then they could always choose not to take action. If they did decide to remove the content, then the next decision facing them would be how to remove it.
One option would be to "remove" it (no different than a community moderator removing things like spam). This action would federate out to other lemmy servers and remove it there as well. The other option that is available to instance admins is to "purge" it. This removes the content from the local server, but does not federate that removal out to other instances. So, the offending content would still be available to the rest of the fediverse since it was federated out and the publisher would have to go play whack-a-mole with every instance out there. The purge option would definitely be the malicious compliance route.
Obligatory shoutout to !anime@ani.social if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven't really watched much western animation in recent years.
Delicious in Dungeon - !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven't watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2's animation (despite the studio's working conditions)
Demon Slayer - another show I haven't watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips
Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.
Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).
A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.
That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:
This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.
ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people's lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.
Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).
The project relies on extensions that are installed separately to pull content from different services (mangadex, mangaplus, etc.). The other day, the tachiyomi devs removed almost all the extensions that they were hosting/maintaining after a threat of legal action from a Korean webtoon company. Here is a relevant discussion thread.
So, as a moderator for !manga@ani.social, I have been trying to keep tabs on how this has been developing over on reddit (especially /r/manga).
I believe that if a publisher were to request content or posts to be removed, it would most likely be directed to the instance admin. In my community's case, that would be @hitagi@ani.social. It would then be up to them whether to or how to remove the content. If it isn't a formal DMCA or if they are in a jurisdiction not bound by the DMCA, then they could always choose not to take action. If they did decide to remove the content, then the next decision facing them would be how to remove it.
One option would be to "remove" it (no different than a community moderator removing things like spam). This action would federate out to other lemmy servers and remove it there as well. The other option that is available to instance admins is to "purge" it. This removes the content from the local server, but does not federate that removal out to other instances. So, the offending content would still be available to the rest of the fediverse since it was federated out and the publisher would have to go play whack-a-mole with every instance out there. The purge option would definitely be the malicious compliance route.