I am new and trying to understand how Lemmy works. I am posting this from my lemmy.world account, on a lemmy.ml community. It seems like you can read, post, subscribe to whatever community outside of the instance you’re registered with. So… Why register on lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml or any other instance, if all communities are accessible to everyone?
Rules. Community feel. Performance. Geographic location. Just off the top of my head.
what about jurisdiction? is that a factor?
Could I, an EU citizen, say, I really want to extra failsafe and benefits of GDPR by signing up on an instance based in an EU country, with a server inside an EU country, abiding EU laws and standard of privacy protection? Is that a thing? Or is the lemmy ecosystem a lawless wild west?
Currently… all very new and I’d say more like the latter. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume GDPR has exemptions for non-business ventures?
I don’t think so. Not in Germany anyway. If you are a service for the general public, I am pretty sure you still have to follow GDPR. Same goes for liability, I assume. The person who is running a server would be liable for whatever content is shared on it…?
But yeah… I think this is a big question to be tackled now that growth is shooting upwards… fwiw, coincidentally, the German based feddit is asking this same question, I just saw right after posing the question: https://feddit.de/c/fedi_ds
ETA: ah, the legal section of feddit (where I signed up) covers the GDPR part very well. Excellent! That’s one of the biggest benefits vs. reddit: EU based servers.
GDPR compliance will only be an issue for EU based instances though I guess. Which rules mine out :)
not true :)
any EU citizen signing up on your server is still protected by GDPR.
this is why many US based sites decided to just not bother and cut off EU visitors to their sites (I mainly run into this with news sites)
Hmm interesting. I guess this should go on the dev’s todo list, if its not already there.
do bees be?
do bees be?
As far as I know the exceptions are only for personal use (whatever that means)
Thanks, so for example I see you’ve signed up in an AUS instance, would you have other accounts somewhere else or use this one in different instances?
I do have accounts on other instances, but thats really just for if my main one is offline for some reason. I use this one to sub and participate, no matter which instance the community is hosted on. ie the one we’re on right now is homed to lemmy.ml