I run a pretty locked down Firefox browser and I noticed when browsing lemmy.world that the browser wants to pull stuff from a long list of other instances, which fails because they aren’t trusted. Is this normal? I thought an instance would collect the things you are subscribed to and store them locally so that you didn’t have to go talk to 20 different servers. Not true?

  • TheOneCurly
    link
    fedilink
    English
    51 year ago

    Yeah… even me just running a little single user instance is capturing a ton of user generated content from all over the world. Luckily it looks like deletes are federating for the most part, so if someone’s home instance does a delete it should propagate eventually.

    • trouser_mouse
      link
      English
      11 year ago

      Fingers crossed - incredibly curious how all this will pan out!

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Sure but there is nothing stopping an instance owner from configuring the local database to not delete, or to have a copy of the database mirrored to some other database.

      So while most instances will delete, it’s fair to say that if someone wants to keep a copy of all messages somewhere, it’s simple to accomplish that.

      What I would do is simply to listen to the activitypub port, and send all raw incoming messages somewhere and store them forever.

      • TheOneCurly
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        Sure, it’s not hard to not comply with GDPR. I was speaking from the perspective of a small instance admin who would like to generally comply without having to think about.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          Will gdpr even apply to individuals running instances? I think it’s just for corporations.