What the Russmedia ruling means for ActivityPub and atproto.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/37085796

Sure, a Romanian marketplace did something bad, what do I care, you might think. But the problem here is two-fold: First, the ruling is written in a way that can be generalised beyond only Romanian online market places, and into pretty much all platforms that fall under GDPR and handle social data. Secondly, copying and publishing data on other websites is exactly what federation is. The function of open social networking protocols like ActivityPub and atproto at their core is to have social data be copied and published on other websites.

This is an uhhh, slight bit of a problem, when European legal rulings make it very unclear if federation itself is in compliance with GDPR.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    Doesn’t the Digital Services Act address this? My laymen’s interpretation of it is, it says you’re not liable as a (covered) platform operator unless you’ve been made aware in some way and then not do anything about it?!

    And we, in the Fediverse have moderation. We don’t just federate content, we also federate the deletions and mod decisions. We mostly disconnect from unmoderated places after we’ve become aware of negative things going on there?!

    Edit: I think now I get it. It’s not about federating in content… It’s about federating it out to other instances we don’t control. And they might ignore our mod’s decision and keep it… Yeah, that sounds like an issue. And it’s not just a legal issue. It’s also bad for our users.