cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/334250
I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:
Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?
Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?
Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?
Man this is the first time I’ve felt at all anti GDPR… Normally I feel that companies should have opt out mechanisms built in for users, but lemmy feels pretty “at will”.
Maybe mastodon has already figured this out? They’re a couple of years ahead of lemmy and in a similar privacy landscape.
Maybe mastodon has already figured this out? They’re a couple of years ahead of lemmy and in a similar privacy landscape.
That’s an excellent point. They do have a lot more users and a lot more time to have solved this issue.
I’m not a programmer nor a lawyer, just a simple user. I didn’t think there was any privacy about the internet. Screenshots can be taken.
In practice you’re correct, but legally, things are more complicated. There are now various laws (GDPR the most notable) that require, among other things, for platforms to delete all data associated with a user upon their request.
