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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you’re going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you’re dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don’t really care.

    However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don’t have an iPhone though, god help you. They don’t care about this.

    I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.

    It looks good on the books but we still, say, don’t have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.





  • I love how you’re an asshole for no apparent reason. We both like this place and are on the same team, even if we disagree about some things.

    But, in all seriousness, I really have the feeling that you are approaching this from the standpoint of a lawyer or someone on the marketing team of a large corporation. Of course a service like lemmy.world, or any of the larger instances, should consult with a lawyer at some point if they haven’t already. But this is not a mega-corporation, and I don’t think many people in Lemmy apart from you have any intention of running it like one.

    Of course these services cost money to run and protect. No one is saying it’s free. To give a similar example, some of the largest Invidious instances blow though several terabytes a day. So they are very much dependent on donations. We should all try and chip in if we are able.


  • I think part of the problem is that laws in the developed world essentially make in extremely expensive to run one of these services if you have a lot of users per month.

    Te heart of the issue is that at some point it becomes more useful for mega-corporations to have a cozy relationship with the government than with you. It used to be that if a service found that there was child porn on their service, the law simply required them to remove it and report it to the police. Very reasonable.

    The thing is though, if that is all the compliance one needs to follow, then the creation of new firms and services is quite easy. Mega-corporations don’t like this. They want to slow the creation of new services and firms because this slows the appearance of new competition. Hence they become pro-regulation, and, I’d argue, attempt to shift the entire culture towards paranoia and a demand for more regulation.

    Perhaps the only defense is to stay small. Obviously don’t allow any abusive or illegal content. But stay small so that you can skirt by without having to deal with compliance with the big-boy regulations.