Companies should just be charged the fine multiplied by the number of offenses (like any individual being charged), then multiplied by the number of employees. Any amount over their available cash, becomes asset seizure (for “too critical to fail” companies) or make them go through bankruptcy to liquidate. Hell, you can even be nice and let them do a “payment plan” over a year or two, seizing all profit until the fine is paid in full. I bet companies would follow laws remarkably well if that were on the line.

The US would just be a couple Facebook privacy violations away from running a governmental surplus for the first time in decades!

Just think about it like reddit and email had a baby: !subreddit@email.com.

subreddit is now called a community

email.com is now called an instance

When you send a normal email message, you need to know the person’s email address. On Lemmy, each comment, post, user, and community gets its own unique “email address”. When you share something, you tell everybody this email address. The instance someone is using when they click the address is smart enough to find and open all the posts/comments/etc associated with that address.

If you share it as a normal link, it’s like forcing a Gmail user to switch to Hotmail just to open the one email. They might not have a Hotmail account, so they can’t respond or interact with it without going back to Gmail first.