I’ve wanted a badge that shows the instance uptime and couldn’t find any, so I created one. It’s available at https://uptime.lemmings.world/{your-domain}.svg and gets its data from fediverse.observer.
Examples:
- Lemmings.world: - https://uptime.lemmings.world/lemmings.world.svg
- Lemmy.world: - https://uptime.lemmings.world/lemmy.world.svg
- Lemmy.ml: - https://uptime.lemmings.world/lemmy.ml.svg
- discuss.tchncs.de: - https://uptime.lemmings.world/discuss.tchncs.de.svg (congrats on that uptime, by the way!)
- and so on
The documentation is available at https://uptime.lemmings.world. Feel free to use it for your instance if you wish to.
Well, feel free to read GDPR yourself, I did multiple times, as did my colleagues as did our lawyers. If some piece of information cannot be tied to an individual, it’s not a personally identifiable information (PII). Let’s say your name is Matthew. If I have Matthew stored in my database, I don’t have to ask for your permission. If my database has the information that @[email protected] has a first name “Matthew”, it’s a PII and I have to ask for your consent (or have a valid business reason to require your first name).
From the perspective of a Lemmy instance provider, they’re indeed responsible for their user’s PII. But in any case, I would only receive the IP address of someone, which I couldn’t tie to any other PII and thus it’s not a PII in itself.
If you disagree, all I can say is that you should read GPDR yourself, because I’m quite sure that I’m correct, because we’ve spent quite a lot of money and time on this exact issue a few years ago.
An IP can nearly always be tied to an individual, as it is linked to a physical location. IANAL, maybe you are right in regards to the GDPR, but from a privacy perspective it is still a really bad idea to embed this kind of potential tracking into your website with no way for users to opt out.
Feels like a moot point, especially here on Lemmy (or Fediverse in general), where almost everything you send is automatically sent to hundreds of other servers. But, well, I promise I don’t care about your IP and don’t store it even in system logs. Would it calm you a bit if I included a privacy policy?
The data send to other servers via Federation is not critical private information like an IP address, however you are right that due to the way Lemmy loads images from other instances, IP addresses are currently leaked to other servers. But I hope that will be improved with a better image proxy in the next version (Lemmy 0.19.x in combination with Pictrs 0.5.x).
It’s nice that you promise to not abuse this and I trust that you are not lying about it, but this is a general problem and I don’t think services like this should be used as your instance’s users are usually not aware of the implications.