Also not a lawyer but I’ve done a lot of GDPR training since it was introduced and I believe you’re incorrect—the data subject posting it publicly or not doesn’t factor into the validity of a deletion request under the GDPR. There are a limited set of specific reasons a service owner can refuse a deletion request and they’re pretty much down to preventing abuse and facilitating compliance with other laws.

From your link

Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person[15]

The “directly or indirectly” part is important here, a username is a constant identifier between a user’s posts and comments

Given comments and posts are free text input, there’s no way of knowing the entire set of a user’s content doesn’t contain PII, unless an admin wants to spend the time combing through and determining which posts definitely contain PII and which definitely don’t, they should delete it all. The data subject does not need to make specific listings of what they want deleted, the onus is on the service owner to be able to process the deletion request completely and within a timely manner.

Not an admin, but from a legal perspective, users in the EU have the right to request deletion of their data under the GDPR, which the consequences of violation are up to €10m or 2% of annual turnover (not profit), whichever is higher

Frankly, if a user asks a service owner to delete their personal data, the service owner should do it as promptly as possible.

Was gonna say, I’m sat on 2.2k comments apparently in about 15 months, which is surprising to me given I probably only comment on about half the days in any given week.

I will say compared to Reddit though, I tend to be more likely to comment here because there’re fewer people here and I want it to feel active enough for more people to continue joining (either lemmy in general, or just on smaller communities that don’t have a lot of activity yet).

I specifically don’t comment on people that give off the vibe they might be one of those kind of nutjobs, precisely because it gives them a notification with my username attached if I do. I’m on this site to kill some time with low effort, I want to minimise the risk of attracting the attention of some weirdo.

I downvote in those scenarios and then report if appropriate. If enough other users feel the same way the comment goes down to the bottom of the thread and fewer users see it. Especially if it’s something that a mod eventually removes, as it reduces the reach until a mod can get to it.

If I risk retaliation for doing that, I (and others) will just stop, meaning those comments stay up front & centre and we lose that soft moderation plus that engagement in general. Going into the comments will just end up being a worse experience

Hard no from me

I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there

Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO

Sync is fantastic, IMO. I switched from Jerboa and Connect a year ago and never needed to look back.

The dev isn’t super active, but updates seem to drop when they need to

Holy shit, a week delay is mad

Well, I can see your post on l.w, so it’s not a total disconnect!

I wonder if there are any bugs in the new version of lemmy—do you know if mander has updated yet? The l.w admins tend to drag their heels updating because of some previously rough update experiences (I think mostly down to the size of the instance compared to others)

There were some issues with federation last time, perhaps it’s something similar

I would say federation doesn’t necessitate the use of a single protocol across the network.

Imagine the scenario where very slowly each protocol aligns on features and just requires simple translation? What if one or both start to implement parts of the other spec?

Would you only call it federation if they used identical protocols?

I’d say federation is about the actual content being shared across decentralised services and not the technical means by which it’s shared

Unfortunately given I’ve not been an active java engineer in over a decade, I’m getting this from conversations I’ve had and presentations I’ve seen from the Java engineers at my workplace and that I’ve previously worked with. I’m genuinely happy to be corrected though, I’ve definitely not got a horse in the Java framework race, at any rate.

Perhaps I’m/they’re mistaken, but I’ve got the impression from them that everything is heading towards Micronaut or Quarkus (and perhaps others that people I work with aren’t looking at) if you’re sticking with Java, and starting something new in SB would be against that direction of travel. Might be worth pointing out that a few of the Java devs seem to be doing more in kotlin as well, so perhaps it might be more to do with that and I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

You know what, I’ve read your blog post linked to another reply and understand your reasoning more and it now seems like a much less hostile project than it was initially coming across, which at the end of my previous comment had started to look a bit like EEE to me. I’m a lot less negative towards the project now I know you guys have attempted to contribute to lemmy unsuccessfully in a few ways.

I’m still a little sad that a cooperative solution couldn’t be worked out with the Lemmy guys, as more people pulling the same way is always better than two groups pulling in different directions IMO (even if they’re currently aligned today), especially for relatively small projects like these. But if that wasn’t ever gonna happen for whatever reason, I get the reason for a split.

FWIW, the language doesn’t really matter if it does the job effectively, it wouldn’t have been my choice, but obviously I’m not the one building it so that doesn’t really matter. I’ve been “lucky” enough to have seen multiple horror shows in perl which are still in production today and serve miraculous amounts of traffic—again it absolutely wouldn’t be my choice, but it does the job.

So good luck then, it will be interesting to see how things develop with this project. I’ll edit out the last line of my previous comment.

So rather than the relatively simple task of learning rust (honestly not that tough for any half decent engineer, a couple of weekend toy projects had me more or less up to speed with it) they’re going to rebuild and track lemmy API changes—a technically endless task?

And I’ve just seen it’s Spring Boot too, which I’m fairly sure most of the industry is trying to move away from.

Shame the engineers want to spend all that effort that would be better spent improving lemmy rather than fracturing development resources between the two projects.

I’ve now gone from ambivalent towards this to actively hoping it fails.

Edit: see the above comment’s blog post for more context that changed my mind

Can someone explain to me why sublinks was started as a project? If the main difference is improvements to the moderation tools, it feels like it could have just been a PR to lemmy.

I’m trying my hardest to not assume it’s the classic “Java engineers are scared of other languages” meme

That’s a new baked potato topping selection that’s going into my rotation then. Looks great!

The more simple approaches have already been tried and tend to die before they live.

Social media requires a network effect in order to be successful. Given the established players have had nearly 2 decades to accumulate vast networks, it would be a huge uphill struggle to start from zero content and users. Federated & decentralised social media is the answer to this—you get a network for free, giving the software a chance to stand on its own merits.

For this to all work correctly, they must all talk the same, ideally standard, language (the activitypub protocol) and for decentralised software to actually be decentralised, there can be no single point of failure (therefore caching). As someone mentioned, SSO is inherently centralised, even with something like OpenID, if your authority is down, your account is unusable, so it wouldn’t really add much to the experience as it stands (and possibly may risk complicating it more for new users).

Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I’m engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it’s been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.

Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?

Personally speaking, and I don’t think it’s too controversial of a view, but I kinda like that about lemmy.

I have come to hate “personal” focused social media and prefer “content” focused social media. I don’t care about random people or someone hoping to become an internet personality, I’m here for varied content and a selection of opinions in the comments. I don’t want those comments to be from the same people, and if they are, I’d prefer to be oblivious to that. I kinda like how lemmy goes further than Reddit in that it gets rid of cumulative karma counts too, hopefully means we avoid seeing a Lemmy equivalent of karmawhoring.

There was loads of high effort OC on Reddit, people typically weren’t doing it to create a presence (and if they were, they couldn’t have picked a harder platform to accomplish that, other than maybe 4chan)

I suspect the angle is something around avoiding regulation, they were happy with the previous “we’re just a platform” arrangement where they could hold their hands up and waive responsibility for the content and users on it. Now that’s actively being remediated by various governments, I think they’re hoping they can make claims of reduced responsibility for what’s on their site if it can come from elsewhere in the fediverse.

I’m not sure about specifics, but my gut feeling is that this is the angle

We don’t dare summon such unbridled wrath ever again