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@lemmy.theonecurly.page
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    1 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.

    • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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      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@lemmy.theonecurly.page
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        1 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.

        • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

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