Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:
Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it's a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.
I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.
I suspect they mean blocking instances at the user level - Mastodon allows this.
Yeah there is, governments too. It's not super widespread but they do have a presence.
Due to how federation and anti-viral Mastodon is though, they can't hijack trends and stuff so a lot will most likely never come.
Kind of surreal seeing my own Mastodon post linked, damn.
If you're curious about the details I refer to, there's an indepth article on lwn.net regarding this from 2016 here: https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/
This is actually 0.0.7 as Baz forgot to update the internal string; 0.0.8 I assume will be coming a little later. I ended up uninstalling from Izzy and getting the APK because I am impatient. 😩
Not sure how I feel about this being a standalone app, it already feels like there's so many vying for attention, with IRC, XMPP and Matrix being federated already. While Signal exists, I'm not sure how I feel about it being a walled garden despite being open source.
I do love the idea of it hopefully being added to Fediverse platforms though - even though it makes sense to use an actual messaging app for messaging, it's user expectation that you can just message people on any platform you're on easily, it's something Mastodon desperately needs.
Edit: Really though, what I want to see is an interoperable protocol being picked (Signal is actually one of them, FWIW, the Foundation just doesn't federate with its flagship app due to "user experience and innovation" per Moxie), and then people make their platforms on that, just like how ActivityPub has become the standard for interoperable social media.
I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea... That could take a very, very long time.
I tried Sync for a little bit, but I didn't really vibe with it to be honest, Infinity is still by far my favourite phone client.
Really, you should just download it anyway and try it, you'll find out quickly if it's for you or not.
That's my take on it as well - GDPR is for the individual instances to deal with, as they're the ones who hold the data on their users and anything coming to them.
The software, of course, can have some design which purges data automatically or whatever, but ultimately the control is whoever is hosting Lemmy so no matter what Lemmy does, people can override it (though some sane defaults are always good, of course).