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
Edit3: direct link to philpo great answer–>https://feddit.de/comment/840786
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
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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.
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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
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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)
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.
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