I wouldn’t assume the EU would necessarily be interested in protecting the Fediverse. Legislation like the GDPR is very much oriented towards working with corporate entities and the open Fediverse model is generally at odds with the right to be forgotten (since it’s effectively impossible to ensure all copies of a user’s data are deleted - I don’t even think it’s possible to determine which nodes may have a copy of a year old post).
I think it’s a position that often comes from ignorance. Usually these people have no concept that games can involve high quality character and plot writing like Mass Effect, or teamwork focused gaming situations like MMO raids. They either never had any exposure to games or decided early on (usually in adolescence) that games weren’t for them.
Ironically there’s often a lot of overlap between game haters and people who spend more hours in front of the TV than most of us do gaming.
It’s very possible that an EU instance that comes under regulatory scrutiny for whatever reason will have to start requiring Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) from every instance it federates with.
Ultimately that would likely result in a few paid, professionally run instances, which only federate with each other and maybe a few similar instances in other regions with the capacity to provide DPAs.
And next to that, a forest of independent, non-conforming instances flying under the regulatory radar; an entirely separate fediverse from the centralized one where instances disappearing is a regular occurence.
But is it solvable at all in principle? The only enforcement policy available is defederation, but that just means future posts won’t go to that instance, the older posts will still be there. Plus an instance could just lie when confirming delete requests and you’d never know unless the non-deleted posts leaked.
The Wii balance board had this feature too. Of course, one time my friends’ asked him to put down the baby or pet he was holding when he went to use it after a big dinner.
I bounced off Knight despite loving Asylum and City exactly due to the Batmobile. Admittedly driving sequences are a hard “meh” for me at the best of times, but they felt much worse here because they forced me away from the batsuit traversal.
It’s actually rare these days that mail from my personal server (on a Linode/Akamai IP) is rejected, and I don’t even have DMARC set up, only SPF and DKIM. I just use my old gmail address as a backup for those rare situations.
I’m happy to pay it myself, as I find that with other engines I pay in frustration and time because the results have to support those who do pay: the advertisers. Much higher value in my daily life than e.g. a Netflix sub.
What we really need is some sort of torrent-like system for this content with something equivalent to magnet links.
I too am a happy customer. The ability to tweak individual site ranking especially makes searching the internet so useful again.