My understanding is that some tech companies overcompensate, not because they’re afraid of running afoul of EU regulation, but as a means of pushing back against EU regulation that threatens to undermine their profits. That’s often the play when companies like Facebook warn that they’ll have to stop offering news in EU countries if a particular regulation passes. I have no doubt that regulation has constricted Google results in some ways (Right to Be Forgotten, for example), but I wonder if part of the disparity isn’t voluntary on Google’s part, as a means of applying political pressure in a system that’s less amenable to direct political lobbying than the US.

I’ll add, one thing that the admins of lemmy.ml and lemmy.world should think about ahead of June 30th is whether its healthy — for the network, their instances, and/or their mod teams — for two instances to host the majority of accounts on the service. Personally, I suspect that a broader distribution is probably better for everyone, and if they agree on that point, then one thing they work out in the meantime is a plan for how to limit new sign-ups and the best way to direct them out to other instances.

That data migration item might be a little cost prohibitive starting June 30th.

As for feature enhancement, I agree that Lemmy should be forward-looking in terms of what it needs in order to enhance the service, but I don’t know that catering to expectations set by Reddit is necessarily the best path. Reddit evolved to suit the needs of a centralized, profit-seeking service. Not all of the decisions they made along the way were necessarily optimal for users, conducive to strong communities, or even particular good for society as a whole, no matter how much the Reddit userbase has grown to tolerate or even demand them. And, ultimately, I don’t think it’s healthy for Lemmy to stake its future on its potential as a Reddit replacement. At some point, it needs to chart its own course. The devs should certainly learn from Reddit where they can, but Lemmy can be more than just where Redditors go when they’re pissed off at the admins.

I don’t know if anyone still remembers the whole “vote fuzzing” or “vote normalization” debate on Reddit. Basically, there was speculation for a long time that Reddit was artificially adding up and/or downvotes to post scores, and new posts claiming to have found the smoking gun showed up on /r/TheoryOfReddit on a weekly basis. It exercised us quite a bit, because the premise that the numbers weren’t accurate made it difficult to assess a number of things about how the site operated, which was kinda the whole point of that sub. The admins kept an eye on ToR, and would comment on things every once in a while, so we asked them, and they replied, on multiple occasions, that no, the votes weren’t “normalized.” Their main explanation for why it looked like votes were being artificially added was that the servers handled votes in batches to balance the load of requests on the system, and that led to a certain amount of jerkiness in how the scores changed. That was there answer, so that’s what we told others whenever the issue came up.

Then, one day, a relatively new admin chimed in on a discussion and said, yeah, the system is designed to add votes that no actual person had submitted. Wait, I replied, isn’t this the thing we’ve been calling normalization, and that other admins had told us wasn’t something that the site did? Yeah, he said, you could call it that.

That’s when I bailed on Reddit. Not being able to trust the numbers was one thing, but after that, I felt that couldn’t trust the admins. Because we had asked them directly, and were putting time and effort into explaining to other users what they had told us was the way things worked, and that had all been a waste because they had misled us for years.