As the Fediverse grows more and more, rules and regulations become more important. For example, is Lemmy GDPR compliant? If not, are admins aware of the possible consequence? What does this mean for the growth of Lemmy?
Edit: The question “is Lemmy GDPR compliant” should mean, does the software stack provide admins with means to be GDPR compliant.
Edit2: Similar discussion with many interesting opinions on lemmy.ml by /u/infamousbelgian@waste-of.space–> https://lemmy.ml/post/1409164
Edit3: direct link to philpo great answer–>https://feddit.de/comment/840786
I would imagine that the caching that Lemmy does has been tested in court, since the intent of the cache isn’t to create a permanent copy of the data. It would likely only become a problem with GDPR if that data would stay across the instances.
As far as the federated server is concerned, the copy it has is canonical and kept forever until such a time that it receives an edit/delete signal from the original instance. I’m not really sure if you could plausibly call that caching, but I’m not a GDPR lawyer (or any variety of legal professional, for that matter) 🤷
I don’t see this staying in Lemmy as the federation grows. I can’t see admins being able to sustain these costs.
Well… that’s just kind of how it has to work. Storage is cheaper than bandwidth and it’s not a close contest. Historically, storage costs have fallen faster than networks have grown and it is probably safe to assume that this trend will continue indefinitely.
FWIW: The stuff that gets federated is all text. Image uploads aren’t federated at all – those are just shared as URLs which point to the instance wherein they were originally uploaded. This is actually why things like avatars are currently so unreliable on Lemmy – they can’t scale well without there being local copies.