SavvyWolf

From a technical standpoint, there is no real difference, it comes down to how the instance owner feels it’s best to run the server.

Ultimately, instances (or at least the ones most people want to join) want to keep rulebreakers, trolls and spam out. There are two main ways of doing this:

• Proactively: By attempting to prevent bad actors from signing up in the first place.
• Reactively: Allow everyone to sign up, and ban bad actors when they misbehave.

Of course, there is a lot of debate as to which of these methods are better (beehaw, for example, fundamentally doesn’t think a reactive approach can work at all), which causes tension between some instances.

This tension can rise to a point where one instance “defederates” from another, meaning they stop talking to each other and you can’t interact with one if you have an account with the other.

https://sub.rehab/ Is also useful, if you want to look up by subreddit.

Out of interest, since Chromium is open source, is there anything stopping Opera, Edge, Brave, etc. just mantaining support for the old manifest? Like, I’m not sure why this is such a big deal for anything other than Chrome and Chromium.

IMO it’s pretty much the same case as email. With email you send data to some remote server which may or may not reside in the EU.

I’m not really sure what argument you can make that fediverse apps but not email break gdpr.

Or even something as simple as putting your email on a public website that may be visited by someone in the US.

You can actually see this here; beehaw recently blocked lemmy.world , so as far as Beehaw is aware, lemmy.world “doesn’t exist”.

• https://beehaw.org/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
• https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld

As you can see, old posts remain on the instance (unless the admins go and remove them), but new posts don’t get received. I think you might be able to post on Beehaw’s mirror, but they won’t get shared with any other instances.

Of course, this is all subject to change in some future Lemmy version, because this sort of thing can be confusing and counter intuitive.