I stumbled upon this article from the exellent NYOB organization - the one with Max Schrems - and they mention that a federated social network may be a possible way to avoid the current GDPR problem of transferring EU citizens data to the US.
Read the whole thing, but the relevant quote from the article:
Previously, Facebook / Meta spread the rumor that it would stop providing services in Europe. Given that Europe is by far the biggest source of income outside of the US and Meta has already built local data centers in the EU, these announcements are hardly credible. The long term solution seems to be some form of ‘federated social network’ where most personal data would stay in the EU, while only ‘necessary’ transfers would continue - for example when a European sends a direct message to a US friend. While Meta only got a short implementation period to come up with a solution, it knew about the legal situation for ten years and was already served with a draft decision in 2022.
That is not something I have seen discussed here before, so I thought it might be interesting as an additional reason for “Project 92”.
Transferring data from EU to US is a major GDPR issue, which has been ongoing since 2013. There is a brief overview here: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-us-data-transfers-0
Also consider supporting NYOB, they have done so much work to protect our privacy and get GDPR enforcement done!
If data moves away from an instance with whom an EU user has an agreement, those third party instances have to be bound by the home instance through agreements/contracts to follow the rules of the GDPR before giving away the data. Also the home instance would have to list all instances that have received data or that could likely receive data through such an agreement. Federation is not a solution to GDPR but it rather makes things incredibly complicated for the instance owners if they tried to comply fully. And from what I’ve read, Lemmy doesn’t even have the technical capabilities to make it possible, yet. Maybe that’s what compels Meta. They can just offload responsibility to the instance owners.