At times like this I wish we had /c/LegalAdvice - would love for someone who says "IAAL" to chime in.

Some of the biggest lemmy instances - lemmy.world, feddit.de - are based in the EU. I don't understand how EU based instances like these would be able to get away with not following GDPR.

Though, it may be more that GDPR doesn't apply, as per https://decoded.legal/blog/2022/11/notes-on-operating-fediverse-services-mastodon-pleroma-etc-from-an-english-law-point-of-view/

[The UK GDPR] does not apply to … the processing of personal data by an individual in the course of a purely personal or household activity
But for those spinning up an instance of a fediverse service for them and their friends, for a hobby, I think there’s far more scope for argument.

In any case it seems like asking a fediverse instance to be compliant with the GDPR is possible, see for an example at https://sciences.re/ropa/ and https://mastodon.social/@robin/109331826373808946 for a discussion.

the ISP didn’t block the site,

And from the article you posted at the beginning, perhaps the ISP can't be required to do that. At least it's not list as an explicit remedy. Others are suggesting that Texas might block the site from being accessible from within Texas, but there's nothing in the law itself that suggests Texas would legally do this.

Basically it reads like that they're restricted to whatever the existing office of the AG of Texas could have already done in terms of enforcement powers, which is largely fines.

It seems its up to whomever is registering the account. If the person is under 18 they see a scrubbed version, of the person is over 18 they have full access.

Or, like, not allow registration for under 18s at all, I suppose.

I’m not sure an ISP has control like that. I could be wrong.

No, you are right. The site itself must comply.

Aha,

Exemptions Small businesses as defined by the Small Business Administration (SBA);

Not sure how'd this work overseas, but basically lemmy.world and friends just needs to apply to SBA to get recognized as a small business, and they're all good. (Or perhaps they could try to apply thru a US Embassy; or apply at a local authority and argue for legal equivalence between the SBA's recognition and their own country's).

As for enforcement, well,

If someone were to violate the act, the AG’s office may seek ... civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, and attorneys’ fees

So yeah basically it comes down to trying to grab money. So as they say about sucking blood from a turnip...

My guess is that the law is basically extra-territorial - meaning that in theory it applies no matter where you are based.

For a for-profit service this is more enforceable - just gotta find a way to seize the stream of money flowing out of Texas for violate of the law.

For a service based in the US this is more enforceable - just gotta get the federal system and other states to cooperate, and enforce Texas's court judgement, and then Texas can find a way to seize the stream of money flowing around and out of the US (or perhaps seize the US assets of the company).

For a non-commercial entity based in the territory of the European Union that has no funds flowing at all from the US (think lemmy.world or feddit.de here) then it's probably quite a bit harder to do anything at all in terms of effective enforcement.

(1) allow users to create a public or semi-public profile to use the service

So it seems like I'm safe. I run my own single-user instance to federate and post - but I don't allow others to sign up at all, so they can't create a public or "semi-public" profile here (and what does semi-public mean?)

I think you have already answered the question actually.

How is it bad for Israel?

It is bad for Israel because of the

destruction of any goodwill Israel had after Oct 7

(And I'd add that Israeli citizens and family members of hostages are very upset and frustrated still at the lack of progress in getting the hostages returned. And I'd add how horrible it was when the IDF killed Israeli citizens who were escaped hostages trying to return home. I think one can hold the hostages and their families in the highest regard and with the deepest sympathies, and still understand that there's something very wrong here.)

It is bad for Israel because of the

huge ... displaced population

Having a huge displaced population along your borders is generally not considered a good thing, after all.

I’m pretty sure this can be verified with SS records so maybe wait and see?

Eventually, yes, just that the SS is both a dinosaur and a sloth so expect it to take forever - I've personally tried this.

Lying is bad of course, but when she is running against the liar in chief it hardy seems significant. For a country that desperately needs to avoid Trump 2.0, this seems like more of a distraction.

Agreed. Even if she flubbed and made a mistake/misremembered (like say she took on a friend's shifts or something without actually being employed there, or she somehow misremembered the restaurant) that's hardly a reason for a no vote. I mean, c'mon, really!

Social security records. 90s is nothing, a normal person could get it in a month

I tried this and it takes ages. I applied back on July 1st and haven't heard a peep yet - apparently this can take many months or sometimes even years.

So I actually tried this recently. Everything is done by paper and mail - even though I visited the office in person, they just mail it onwards.

Also, despite having an expected turnaround of six months officially, it turns out that wait times of multiple years are not uncommon once the request is submitted. So even if Harris submitted a request right now the election would be long over before she would have a copy of the records to prove it either way.

Here, here!

A shame about this though,

and blocking access to the IP address of X’s servers from inside Brazilian territory,

Was hoping that the court order there would shut down X globally. If only X were hosted in Brazil... well, one country at a time is better than nothing.

So disappointed to discover that BBC updated the headline and the article (and no more than six hours later)...

New headline: Ukraine calls on Mongolia to arrest Putin ahead of visit

An ICC spokesperson told the BBC that Mongolian officials "have the obligation" to abide by ICC regulations, but clarified that this did not necessarily mean an arrest had to take place.

The agreement says in some circumstances, states may be exempted from the obligation to carry out an arrest where they would be forced to "breach a treaty obligation" with another state or where it would violate "diplomatic immunity of a person or property of a third state".

Agreed. Mostly I'm aware of just two main categories here: speculation (folks who hold it hoping the value will go up and they can pocket the difference) and privacy uses (e.g. cakepay dot com which offers prepaid visa and mastercard virtual credit cards globally for one time use and accepts crypto). And when you think about it, something like a blockchain that forever maintains a history of transactions probably isn't the best technology for the privacy minded....

Can someone help me out here? I still don't get it...

Someone creates a version which adds a Lemmy compatible api to pyfedi and tested out a couple of mobile apps against it, https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/13#issuecomment-1814982

So it's not impossible - but it's also very much a YMMV thing (I suppose it's really still only for developers atm)

I can’t currently log into lemmy.world, and browse peer-tube, yet if I leave my instance, I’m no longer in my account. So you say to just create a peer-tube account. Ok, but now that’s fragmented. There’s two accounts. And then maybe I want to share pictures. Well now I need a pixelfed account. Ok, now that’s 3 accounts for 1 fediverse. And the list only grows. Mastodon? 4 accounts.
I see a future where you log into 1 account from your instance. From that home page on your instance, you can interact with any service that hasn’t banned you, or defederated from your instance. ANY fediverse service. With one account. You can write mastodon messages, post a video to peertube, check your email, post some pictures, whatever. And all your notifications will be in one place. Organized. A centralized decentralization if you will.
I just see a world that doesn’t exist, and I want it to hurry up already

Hey, I think maybe you misunderstood me. The "all under one account" thing is possible for the most part - here's the PR which allows mbin (and thus mbin accounts) to do peertube https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/pull/782 and in pyfedi (and thus piefed accounts) there seems to also be peertube integration https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/community/util.py#L75 along with pixelfed integration ( https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/user/routes.py#L981 ) - though I'd grant that you're correct about there still being rough edges that need to be cleaned up, but I am confident that they will get cleaned up over time.

So that part of the vision is pretty much already here. The only thing is if you want to create and own the magazine/community (the 3%) ... well see https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/869 (but I think even remote account ownership is on a wishlist somewhere, so even that may get taken up some day.

There's even an open item about being able to transfer your account to another instance (account portability), see https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/171

So I tried to search for pyfedi, and the only things I found are some repos. Not quite sure what to do
with that. HOWEVER, a few different repos seemed to list piefed as the thing it do.
So is pyfedi the same as piefed.social ?

piefed.social is the flagship instance while pyfedi is the software. By analogy, lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of Lemmy, kbin.social was the flagship instance of the kbin software, and while it doesn't offically have a flagship fedia.io is the largest instance to run the mbin software.

I am enjoying the layout of piefed. It’s quite tasty! I hope this is the thing that does the other thing.

Yes!

But what if I transfer my Lemmy account to Piefed? Will I still be able to create communities on Lemmy.World?

My understanding is that unfortunately, to be the owner of a community or magazine (such as !Fediverse@lemmy.world ) that's local to given instance (lemmy.world here) your account would also have to be local.

Or am I going to just end up with two different accounts, on two different sites, that do 97% the same thing?

From what I understand, most folks pick one favoured instance as their primary one for that 97% - but create the local account to own the magazine/community as well as the rest of the 3%. (Note that you can add your primary account as a mod though, even if it's not local - so you have to create the community on lemmy.world with your lemmy.world account, but then you can add your piefed.social account as a mod to that community and then manage the new lemmy.world community mostly from piefed.social.)

Or am I just wrong all around, and pyfedi has nothing to do with piefed, and I’ve stumbled onto a different thing that does the thing that the other thing couldn’t do, but is still connected to, but not in the same way, but still uses the same services?

What can I say? The fediverse is complicated. But in a good way.

So it's not uncommon for customer facing subcontractors to be given the gear of and wear the uniform of the lead company. In addition this makes even more sense for temps - who originally were suppose to just be the dudes and dudettes who filled in when someone got sick or had jury duty. And of course in these cases the person is typically still an employee - just of the temp/subcontracting company.

But what happens is that these drivers are clearly not temps (they stick around Amazon too long) and for a true subcontractor, the managers of that subcontractor would have a lot more say over the conditions of work for their employees (i.e. being able to mandate vacation/time-off for individual employees, exceptions to some of the stricter rules (like no car singing???)) as well as working for multiple companies, instead of just Amazon alone.

In this case Amazon was indeed a joint employer - they had too much control over the employee. If the union tried to negotiate with the subcontractor on behalf of the employee, they'd get told "we can't do that because of Amazon" but then Amazon would refuse to come to the table. So either the union had to give up, or even if the subcontractor diligently came to a reasonable agreement with the union - Amazon would abruptly cancel the contract and force the subcontractor into receivership or something. Then Amazon could wash its hands clean of the matter and start fresh by looking for a new subcontractor.

Perhaps an employee might still have some rights here - like filing against Amazon for being a party to a breach of contract or something - but I could easily imagine this getting signed away into binding arbitration and the employee promptly losing.

Fortunately, this ruling under the new joint employer rule puts an end to that kind of nonsense. Now Amazon HAS to participate or be punished like any ordinary employer - it can no longer hide behind some fly-by-night delivery service partner company.

The nice thing about the NLRB is that, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they have the ability to sue directly as a party (rather than having the employee being the plantiff) which bypasses any arbitration agreements (since the NLRB obviously never signed one). (Source: https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/the-nlrb-on-what-employers-get-wrong )

Honourable mention to piefed.social / pyfedi which can do both as well.

However, it's newer than mbin and I'm not sure about mobile apps working with it.

Harris would make history in multiple ways - first woman president, first president of Indian subcontinent heritage, second sitting VP to get elected president, etc. All music to my ears.

Lemmy is open source and so anyone who wants to add this functionality is free to do so.

Considering who the original creators of Lemmy are and the controversy over lemmygrad.ml however, I'd say that we dodged a bullet, all things considered.

If you want a thing that tries to integrate with everything, consider pyfedi - in addition to Lemmy and Mastodon they also have code to integrate with pixelfed and probably even more things (I'm still learning about all the integrations that it has).