I’d be really keen to host a lemmy instance but just wondering with GDPR and everything, if there is anything else to consider outside of the technical setup and provisioning of hardware?

Lemmy is storing users data so is there any requirement to do anything GDPR wise?

Hope this is the right place for this - But seen a lot of posts interested in hosting their own lemmy instance, and this is an extension of that

  • Max-PEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Yeah pretty much, although not entirely. I only get pushed copies of the intersection between the communities my instance tracks and the victim’s, and only from the time my server started federating those. I guess I could make a bot account that subscribes to every possible Lemmy communities so that I do get a copy. I could also patch up the backend to ignore any deletion requests and stash up everyone’s deleted posts and even go fetch linked images and store them forever.

    It’s not really a secret though. Some users in another thread were shocked to learn that kbin does publicly display that information. For example, picking the first post on kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/124303/Bluesky-temporarily-halts-sign-ups-because-so-many-people-are-joining/votes/up

    Essentially, it’s extremely public, so one’s gotta be careful about every single interaction on here.

    I only did this for example’s sake, I respect people’s privacy and have no intention of running a hostile instance. But point being, anyone can rather easily.

    • @vegetaaaaaaaEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Interesting - I had the feeling this was how the federation mechanism worked, I don’t see how it could work without sacrificing privacy.

      So a “bad” actor could just spin up their own instance, federate with a huge amount of other instances (I don’t think other instances have a say in this, except if they explicitly, manually blacklist the “bad” instance?), and start profiling users based on their votes.

      The potential for global surveillance is enormous. But I can also see it being useful to detect and fight bot farms, spam, brigading and other bad stuff that has plagued Reddit for quite some time.

      Lemmy could do a better job at informing users that basically everything you do here is public (including votes). On Kbin the /votes/up page makes it clear at least (I like that even comments have a /votes/up page).