Daniel Jackson

Everybody is talking about the GPDR, but the GPDR when hosting in the EU, should be the least if your concerns. As I said elsewhere:

• Lemmy is not doing tracking/personalized-ads.
• Lemmy is only collecting IPs and email addresses as personally identifiable information. It’s not sharing them. So it makes GDPR compliance easy.

The real issue is Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which is a nightmare if you want to host lemmy legally. Realistically, the government don’t care about a few copyright infrigement by some guy/gal hosting a lemmy instance in their garage.

But, if you want to follow the law to the letter, the EU doesn’t have any fair use. So theorically, you need to allow users to only post creative commons images, with attribution. Or do some copyright checks on the content posted on your instance. Here is an EU video on how to comply with the directive, it’s a nightmare.

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As I said in another comment, the GDPR protects people. And the GDPR only applies to personnaly identifiable data (IPs, email addresses, street address, legal name, date of birh…) Lemmy only collect emails and IPs, and do not share them between instances. So it’s very easy to comply to the GDPR as long as you don’t do anything shady.

The EU has a marketing issue. They tried to pass legislation to prevent companies to collect data. But instead, company displayed a popup, kept collecting data, and blamed it on the EU. Everytime I see a popup, I blame ruthless data collection.

Actually, Lemmy is most likely violatiing the California Consumer Privacy Act, which, as opposed to the GPDR, gives the right to update/delete any data generated by the user, not only personally identifiable information.

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The GDPR doesn’t apply only to services hosted in the EU, but any services handling the data of an EU citizen.

This is why some news outlets in the US just decided to block EU users all together, out of laziness.

IANAL, but the GDPR doesn’t cover pseudonymous data. Actually the GDPR encourages data processors (= services) to use pseudomization.

Personally identifiable information are IPs, email addresses, street address, name, date of birth, … Lemmy only collect IPs and email addresses. And these are not shared between instances.

Whether the service is hosted in the EU or not, as long as it serves EU users, lemmy should provide a way to delete emails and ip information in a self serving way. (maybe by deleting the account) In the mean time, instances admins have to fulfil requests to delete emails/ips of EU citizens from the database.

ABSOLUTELY NO!!!

Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.

Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won’t post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.

I like diversity of opinion. I don’t want facebook, I don’t want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.

I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won’t become an issue. But I might be utopian.

Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they’re there to stay.

All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:

• Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
• The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
• Lack of content
• Lack of users

Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn’t happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.

https://lemmy.world/instances shows “burgit (dot) moe”

Find your instance: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

This is our moment…