This is kind of a question and conformation. Is there a way to backup a lemmy account from one instance and in case some thing happens, restore that user in another (with all the posts, likes, etc) ? I read that they were working on cross instance accounts , but is there a workaround meanwhile? Do we know the status of this implementation?
Didn’t the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason – or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it’s been a few years…)
Lemmy is a small FOSS project ultimately, not a corporate entity. If anyone got penalized, it’d probably be the instance host owner at the end of the day. I’m sure they’d be willing to add this feature if someone added it for them, but they got plenty on their plate. If you desperately wanted to for some reason, you might be able to convince the instance owner to export your info from the DB lol, but it’s not even worth the effort.
I think it’s more about being prepared for potential attack using loads of GDPR requests that definitely can’t get processed manually even in 30 days. You know, just like we did with Reddit a few months ago.
Yeah, Lemmy and the GDPR is just an accident waiting to happen. I suppose somebody could just write a script to extract the requested information from the (PostgreSQL?) database. And share that script with other admins. But there are other parts of the GDPR that we also don’t pay any attention to.
Edit: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3976
Considering most servers are run by volunteers, it’s unlikely the EU will try to enforce it.
However it would be nice to have the feature, and Mastodon does have the feature to export your data to ActivityPub format.