Lemmy and GDPR - What is the current state?

NewBrainWhoThis@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 76 points –

As the Fediverse grows more and more, rules and regulations become more important. For example, is Lemmy GDPR compliant? If not, are admins aware of the possible consequence? What does this mean for the growth of Lemmy?

Edit: The question "is Lemmy GDPR compliant" should mean, does the software stack provide admins with means to be GDPR compliant.

Edit2: Similar discussion with many interesting opinions on lemmy.ml by /u/infamousbelgian@waste-of.space--> https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164

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GDPR Art 4.(1) 'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

Posts in the Lemmy instances contain information relating to an identifiable natural person (by their user handle), as they contain the person’s ideas and opinions. Therefore the Lemmy instances are handling personal data and must comply with the GDPR.

Lemmy can avoid the impossibly heavy burden of compliance by becoming an underground illegal service and/or IP banning the Europeans Union and/or abolishing the European Union.

Lemmy can avoid the impossibly heavy burden of compliance by becoming an underground illegal service and/or IP banning the Europeans Union and/or abolishing the European Union.

That is a terrible option, cuts off a huge amount of potential users, and basically impossible to do fediverse wide. In fact, The European Union actually has official Fediverse accounts (on Mastodon, custom instance), and if the EU itself is willing to use a platform, that means it's probably not gonna be taken down by the EU.

Recent event shows the lemmeyverse cares neither about new users nor federation. Everything is designed to work off a single exclusionary instance or small cabal of large instances

This is a natural phenomenon called the Pareto principle. Roughly 80% of the users will sign up for the top 20% of instances. It happens everywhere in nature and it's unavoidable. But I don't think it will be a problem, federation is designed to work like this. You're not forced to stay on lemmy.world, you can move whenever you want.

Can you elaborate on this? How does it not care about those things?

If you're not in the main instance, your going to be handicapped in your ability to stay in the loop. First because now everything goes through federation, which was a design afterthought for Lemmy, and that means stuff outside the instance always takes second place to what is inside the instance. Then you have issues like federation which are extra layers of censorship for everything outside your instance. I've of the biggest problem is accessing outside communities. First you have to actually go to other instances and find them. They won't show up until at least one person subscribes. And this has to be fine in every instance for every other instance and every communities in each of their instances before they would even become visible. Of course, this is such a high bar that by the time you do all this, you'll realize 99.99% of users will not go through this trouble. They will just go to the biggest community on the biggest instance.

Last problem, if you go to your instance/c/acommunity , you'll see only that instance's "acommunity" There is no way to refer to "acommunity" for the entire fediverse. There is no fediverse community. Only parallel, same named but unrelated communities that would require extra steps to view all at once if it were even possible.

There is a proposal , an old proposal, to create multireddit like feature for Lemmy. But first, the devs so not want to test down this barrier, si they won't do it. But even if they did, it would not work. Since you'd have to take extra action to aglomerate selected communities with a multireddit, you would be one of very few people to do so because agglomeration would still not be the default. And that means most communities would remain empty deserts anyway.

First because now everything goes through federation, which was a design afterthought for Lemmy, and that means stuff outside the instance always takes second place to what is inside the instance.

At least for me, that hasn't seemed to be a problem. I found everything I wanted to subscribe to from my smaller server via Lemmyverse.net, and now when I look at my subscriptions page, I see all the newest posts from all those different communities. Unless you mean that it prioritizes local content on the 'All' page instead of subscriptions.

First you have to actually go to other instances and find them. They won’t show up until at least one person subscribes.

That isn't ideal, I will admit. Without Lemmyverse.net it would be difficult to find everything that interested me.

But first, the devs so not want to test down this barrier, si they won’t do it.

If Lemmy won't, then I suspect that would leave the door open for Kbin to implement.

It's not going to be a problem to find the communities. Since people on arandominstance.com won't be posting on arandominstance.com/c/interestingtopic

They will know if they did, no one would every see it, except for the dozen other people on arandominstance.com

Instead, they'll Google for the biggest /c/interestingtopic , find on what instance it is and go post there

We don't get to the part of having difficulty finding them because they don't get created in the first place

Speaking for myself, my home instance of slrpnk.net is still quite small with only around 600-ish members, but seems active enough to be engaging and certainly worth posting and commenting in. It's not terribly different from posting in a small niche sub on reddit.

If there really was only a dozen members in an instance, I could see where there likely wouldn't be much activity unless it was a group of friends, but I don't see how it wouldn't still function as an effective portal to the other bigger servers, if account creation is ever closed on those.

Are you sure these growing pains will never be addressed? I don't really see why the Lemmy devs would be inclined to not eventually fix these issues. Do you feel the kbin devs would be more receptive to these ideas?

I mean, 600 users that's a lot and yet you look at

https://slrpnk.net/c/knitting

And there isn't one post.

This is what I mean. Your knitting users have to go off instance to https://lemmy.world/c/knitting

In a working system based on federation, it wouldn't matter in what instance you make a /c/knitting post, it would be seen on all instance's /c/knitting

There is no indication this big will every get fixed, and many inducations this is against Lemmy developpement philosophy. I have seen no indication of kbin doing differently either.

Either you post on the big /c/knitting , or nobody (less than 1% of 1% of all Lemmy users) will see your post before it goes stale (72 hrs)

I mean I wouldn't mind a multi-reddit sorta feature like you describe, but I actually like that there are silo'd instances, I don't always want to see EVERY post about a subject on the fediverse if my own community has higher quality content of that subject. Also, not every instance needs to be a generalized place with every topic, I like that many of them cater to certain themes.

I would like the option to see everything of a certain subject at once, don't get me wrong, but I see the small silo'd instances as a feature, not necessarily a bug.

The problem is that it's easy to filter only local content. But the current system is biased for local content first. So paradoxically this means local content will wither and die because no one will see it.

Content should be global first and local second. That way, you can post wherever you like and it will get global exposure.

This way users will not be incentivized to only post in the biggest community on the biggest instance, while leaving everywhere else a desert.

The current way it's built will recreate a centralized Reddit like with few fragmented communities

The problem with multireddit, why they were not able to fulfill to promise of bringing multiple communities together was that only a minuscule subset of users used them.

I guess as I've been using Lemmy more, I see that this is actually a fairly large issue. When I post to, say, a Videos community, I crosspost the link to every other Videos community I can find on the lemmyverse. But that's clunky, and if anyone is subscribed to all of those communities for redundancy, it shows up in their feed multiple times, which is likely a little annoying.

It does seem like the community recognizes this is a problem, and there are open issues for it on the github page. I have to assume that at some point the devs will address this issue, it seems odd that they would purposefully choose to ignore it.

lemmy.world should really shut off signups to allow other instances to grow

This is a really bad idea as it would discourage new users to even sign up. lemmy.world could offer you the instance list when signing up but stopping altogether is just too much

Lemmy is developed using EU funds and many of the biggest instances are in the EU