Mastodon: @mattswift@mastodon.social
This is what I think should happen too - having multiple of the “same community” is a feature, but most of the time, I would suspect most people don’t want to create another and would rather join the existing one. If they still want to create another, they’ll obviously be able to just hit “No, create community” or whatever (for example, politics@sweden and politics@netherlands would understandably be different despite the same name).
That’s my take on it as well - GDPR is for the individual instances to deal with, as they’re the ones who hold the data on their users and anything coming to them.
The software, of course, can have some design which purges data automatically or whatever, but ultimately the control is whoever is hosting Lemmy so no matter what Lemmy does, people can override it (though some sane defaults are always good, of course).
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.
As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:
Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it’s a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.
I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.
I suspect they mean blocking instances at the user level - Mastodon allows this.
It’s not really that deep - it’s a combination of network effect and inertia.
Because there’s “nobody” on Lemmy, people don’t join Lemmy. Because nobody is joining Lemmy, there’s “nobody” on Lemmy, and so on and so forth.
Furthermore, Reddit (and other big social medias) already have “everyone” there, so to the vast majority of people they’re just superior platforms as it’s easier to find both people and content. Moving to another platform means giving that up.
There’s no rules for the Fediverse, all it means is that they utilise the ActivityPub protocols to be able to federate with other websites that also use it (there’s others, but basically irrelevant now).
Mastodon requires OAuth2 for apps to get access to your account because it was designed that way, and Lemmy wasn’t, it’s as simple as that. Any platform can be part of the Fediverse (including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc if they really wanted to), which also means that platforms can also do anything they want.