This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • Menu@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?

      • Menu@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.

      • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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          1 year ago

          There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.

          • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.

            • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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              1 year ago

              And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.

              • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.

              • heavyboots@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                This brings up an interesting point. On Mastodon, besides Block User, there is also a Block Instance option. Will we ever see that on Lemmy? Seems like an easy way to resolve what has been a big issue for me (and obviously other people too).

                Aka, you don’t really want to start over on another instance (hey, not migration tools yet!) but you also don’t really want to see posts from a specific server any more. Rather than people having to lobby the server admins about whether or not to defederate, wouldn’t it just be easier to allow user-level instance blocking? (I know I say “just” while knowing zip about how hard that as in the back end, but yes, from a logistics perspective, seems like you could make a lot of spam-level requests leave the admin’s plates by implementing this.)

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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          1 year ago

          Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.

          • Menu@slrpnk.net
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            1 year ago

            They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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          1 year ago

          It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.

    • hruzgar@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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        1 year ago

        No. It’s about being able to voice your opinion without going to jail for it. No one is going to jail for making transphobic memes or comments. But that doesn’t protect them from me blocking them or banning them from my instance.

        • hruzgar@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Ok fair enough. But (outside of the context) defederating/banning certain communities because they don’t have the same beliefs as you can lead to a fully opinionated/based fediverse and should be prevented imo. Everybody should be able to express their opinions no matter what. I don’t want lemmy to change into some kind off mass media like everything else rn. If a post isn’t showing a good/kind, people respecting vibe, it will be downvoted and thus not shown to anybody. And later if lemmy creates an algorithm of some kind, these posts can be ghosted for certain individuals. But i don’t think they should be completely removed and banned from the connected fediverse as this platform is one of the only ways to express ourselves online at this point. I hope i could get my point across

          • The dogspaw @midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Defederation doesn’t prevent them from being able to access the fediverse nobody has a right to harassing people thats like saying you are being discriminated against because you aren’t allowed in the public park because you throw garbage everywhere and spray paint the children’s play equipment but it’s a public park my rights

  • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?

    What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.

    When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.

    This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      We have an open issue for collections of communities, but not for any complicated trees of communities. Creating and linking community trees sounds really complicated, and I don’t know how all that would work.

      • TheWanderer@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know how the code is currently working, but I like this feature idea and would suggest to start very simple and proceed from there.

        For example you could: a) Make a list of communities that are siblings with their id and instance b) add a toggle to view sister community posts yes /no c) query all communities, list the last x posts from each with time constraints, e.g. not older than 1 day or hour depending on the community post frequency d) list them sorted by time of x , depending on what was chosen

        The biggest issue I see with this simple approach, besides others, is that different communities are different in terms of activity / post frequency. So ideally the better, but more effort, way would be to let each community instance communicate their posts themselves via a query with activity metric parameters. Basically the amount of returned posts would depend on common parameters set by the most active instance.

        It’s not yet thought out, but just getting an mvp started and test the waters would probably be better than having it perfect right away while working on it for months

    • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I think the ama is over? But I like this idea! Not sure of the implementation headaches, but it seems a lot more feasible than the other proposals I’ve heard, most of which involve making community names globally unique

  • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.

    As an instance admin, I have some questions:

    • How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.

    • How is Lemmy doing financially?

    • Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?

    • Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?

    • Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?

    • Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?

    As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:

    • What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
    • Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
    • Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
    • Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
    • Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      Alright second part:

      • The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
      • The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
      • This is a question for @[email protected]
      • People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
      • I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @[email protected]
    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      Wow lots of questions here.

      • Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
      • Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
      • I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
      • Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
      • Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
      • No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

      Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    @[email protected], can’t reply to the thread here because the user was defed from us which is a pretty frustrating design for the purposes of reading a whole thread from another instance, but i’d just like to say that if you don’t self crit here you need to delete your avatar, maybe upload a picture of spez instead, because he says the same shit :) like a lot of your other posts but by god this is liberal shit that basically no one wants to see

  • LolaCat@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there’s anything else needs to be added, we’re open to PRs.

      Side note: For me personally, as @[email protected] suggested, SEO shouldn’t be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I’d rather focus on improving lemmy’s search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

      • yay@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.

        It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.

          • yay@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I’ll check what I can do 🙏

            • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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              1 year ago

              I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.

      • Deebster@lemmy.ml
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        edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.

        Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don’t load until the JS has run.

        This isn’t just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.

        I think it’s a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don’t care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.

        • duckington@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Seconding this. In addition to the accessibility, etc benefits, just think about the sheer amount of traffic/users that came from people googling a completely unrelated topic and having reddit pop up. Those are users that might not have otherwise found the platform.

        • poplargrove@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Lemmy-ui uses isomorphic rendering so comments do come loaded (just not all of them) on the first page you visit, no javascript needed. Did you mean it should serve all comments?

          • Deebster@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Hmm, I’ve just tested an that does seem to be the case, at least as far back as 0.17.4. Do you know when this was added? Or if it’s something that can be disabled?

            Looking into Cloudflare Always Online, it uses the Internet Archive’s backup instead of keeping on itself which could explain me seeing zero comments (i.e. IA scraped the page after posting but before any comments). I can’t figure out which page in my history was the post in question, so I can’t be sure.

      • Bucky@816am.ddns.net
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        1 year ago

        and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,

        This is one of the most true statements I’ve read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.

      • FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Fair enough. I’m currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I’m not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

        I’m fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don’t know Lemmy to be able to find it.

    • FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy’s core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It’ll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

      If you’re not sure where to start, Google’s free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      To a certain extent lemmy is inherently at a disadvantage because of how Google ranks things. Google gives a lot of weight to site trust which works on a per host basis, and lemmy is distributed meaning the trust of the system as a whole is diluted across instances. It’s a really stupid system that just helps big sites get bigger. It’s made even worse because big blog sites are actually only owned by a small handful of companies and since single companies own many properties that can collude between them to funnel their page ranks between their network of sites.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m not asking anything because I’m a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it’s clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it’s improving at an amazing pace.

  • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

      This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

      Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

      There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

      Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

      • entropicshart@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.

      • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.

      • fidodo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don’t see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      I’d imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:

      One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.

      Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.

      And everything will be fine.

      I keep seeing people being this up as if it’s some huge problem. There’s tons of /c/memes out there, but [email protected] is clearly the place to go. It’s not confusing, IMO.

      • lily33@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        For me it’s a problem for the exact reason you think it’s fine: I don’t want centralization. If I did, I’d go to reddit. I do want each topic of discussion to be spread out amongst different instances and communities. But for that to be viable, you need a way to get all the content as easily as if it was all in one place.

    • BonfireOvDreams@lemmy.ml
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      Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.

      If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I asked in the other thread about GDPR.

    Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.

    So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      Neither @[email protected] or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.

      We have a Legal section under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.

      • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
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        As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:

        1. Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
        2. If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.

        For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.

        As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.

        So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.

        Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)

        Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          There a different levels of personal data but a unique identifier for a user is one of them because it allows linking information together about a single person, and from there you can try to identify the real person. So an option would be to overwrite all the occurrences of this identifier with random data so you can’t link data together anymore, as long as it’s not also personal data.

          • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
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            1 year ago

            Sure, but you’d still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.

            • Atemu@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              You actually would not. The content of the post can stay but the username/identifier has to be removed. Written text is not PII to my knowledge and every social platforms I’ve actively used only delete the identifier (Reddit, GitHub).

              • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Written content can contain pii, but it’s rarer. Written content isn’t, by default, pii, but if someone tells anything reasonably pii the entire text can be consisted pii even when anonymized.

                • interolivary@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah as someone who had to deal with GDPR in a professional capacity, it’s probably better to just assume that content written by users contains PII since you really have no way of telling whether it does or doesn’t.

                  Naturally you can just ignore that and leave the content as-is, but then you run the risk of some data protection authority ruining your day.

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So, I wonder if Lemmy instances would be responsible for the instances that federate with them. It’s my understanding that the Lemmy instance doesn’t send the user’s data to other instances, rather it is just posted, and the other instances copy it onto their local instance.

          It’s almost like those reddit services that would show deleted content. A user can delete their profile on Reddit, but Reddit isn’t required (that I know of) to go to these services and make sure the user’s data is being wiped out.

      • randint@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?

      • Matt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

        As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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          1 year ago

          That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.

          • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it’s up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it’s up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.

        If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.

          • hikaru755@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Basically, anything that involves the data being present somewhere in information systems that you control. Taking decisions based on it, displaying it on a webpage, make decisions based on it, even just storing it, all counts as processing under GDPR.

          • 1984@lemmy.today
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            1 year ago

            Asking chat gpt, so take it with a bit of salt, but it’s usually correct about these things.

            In the context of data protection and GDPR, “processing” refers to any operation or set of operations performed on personal data. This includes collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, and deleting personal data.

            Processing can be done both manually and automatically. It covers a wide range of activities related to personal data, such as capturing information through web forms, analyzing data for marketing purposes, storing customer records in a database, or even just viewing or accessing personal data.

            Under GDPR, any entity or individual involved in processing personal data is required to comply with the regulation’s principles and obligations to protect the rights and privacy of the individuals whose data is being processed.

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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          1 year ago

          As someone not residing in the EU, I don’t see how they could possibly enforce that. Best they could do is block my instance I suppose. Have they done that for any small site?

          I mean, I would delete/provide all data of any user who requests me to do so for themselves. But I’m likely not following every facet of the GDPR.

          • 1984@lemmy.today
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            1 year ago

            They don’t work like that, they have no technical capabilites. I think it would work more like a company being ordered to pay a fine if a user on your instance finds out that his data is not deleted if he asks.

            But this is complicated so I hope someone else has good input on this topic. Someone must have run a website with registered users in Europe before without being a corporation.

            The fediverse brings a new touch to all of this also, since the posts and comments are replicated across instances. Will that matter to the EU law? Maybe, maybe not.

      • gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        That’s not true. You might be thinking about the German network enforcement act. Every little ecommerce website, even when it’s a one-man operation, has to follow GDPR guidelines when they aim at people in the EU.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      I’m personally a hard copyleft developer, so I’d prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

      One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy’s source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

      So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

      Side note, but I’ve seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”, is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they’ll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

      And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I’d def recommend other instances defederate from them. I’d rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

      For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

  • nowherenear@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.

    As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?

  • h3ndrik@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    What’s your oppinion on lemmy being used by a few hundreds of people for quite some time and then recently exploding overnight with new instances and tens of thousands of new users. That certeinly changed some things…

  • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?

    The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.

  • joelghill@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:

    1. Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?

    2. Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?