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?

    • foxtrot@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
        3·
        1 year ago

        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

    • makanimike@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
        1·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • krnpnk@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          As far as I know the exceptions are only for personal use (whatever that means)

        • makanimike@feddit.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

            • makanimike@feddit.de
              5·
              1 year ago

              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)

                • makanimike@feddit.de
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  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)