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.
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These are certainly big questions to ask. I think GDPR (and similar laws around the world) are even relatively easy.
I think the question of liability and content moderation is a much bigger risk. All those dodgy subreddits that reddit used to have. Is lemmy going to learn from those missteps, or will lemmy make the same mistakes (while legislation of course has matured much more since those days, putting a much higher onus on anybody who runs a server)
“The server I registered with might go down” was the reason I made my own instance instead of joining a public one. It was easy, and now I only have to trust myself that the server will stay online, and that the server is up to date and built from the GitHub source without modifications.
Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, anyone who used that as their “home server” won’t be able to log in or interact with Lemmy. So, one factor you might want to think about when joining an instance (or running your own) is, “What’s their uptime like?”
In a few days, and then on July 1st, we’ll also get to ask, “How well did ___ handle the Reddit exodus?”
I’m also new, but I found it easier to subscribe to a community in your local instance. Just click the subscribe button. The only way I’ve found to subscribe to a community in another instance is to fiddle with the URL which is annoying if I want to subscribe to a hundred external communities.
Load distribution. Different Lemmy instances are run by different volunteers who can only put so much money into them. So if lots of volunteers put up their own instances, then ideally each instance could have a few users signed up and thanks to federation, they’ll all be interconnected.
Haven’t seen anyone mention this but some instances are themed around a topic or a country, with all their communities on that theme. So if you want your local feed to be on that theme, they’d be a good choice.
Most instances are general though, so local is full of a bit of everything.
Yeah I guess that’s what I’m struggling with, say for example I’m into baking and there’s a baking community here on .world, but maybe there’s another one on .ml and wait here’s a good one on .ca or something. So I’ll be subscribing to three different baking communities in three different instances, it seems a bit redundant/divisive? But maybe it’s just because it’s early days, and with time the “best” communities will conglomerate and people will know the “best” baking community is on the .ml instances, but the best cooking one is on .world, etc, instead of subscribing to multiples of the same.
