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Will Lemmy/ the fediverse become age verified platforms? (lemy.lol)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Age verification becomes more common. Australia, France, etc. introduce such laws to ban children below 15 years from social media platforms, to protect them.

Will these laws also be relevant to fediverse/lemmy specifically?

Personally I think these laws will focus on the big platforms at first (facebook/meta, youtube, discord, instagramm), which will force younger users with technical skills onto smaller and niche sites. Over time focus on this question will increase for the fediverse.

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[โ€“] 77 points 7 months ago (7 children)

It might happen for some instances, but I think if some countries start requiring fediverse instances to do this, most users will switch to instances hosted in countries that don't require it.

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  • [โ€“] 17 points 7 months ago

    I'm based in the UK. But my instance only actually has single digits of actual active users. So, it's not bothering me too much.

    The moment I get a letter from OFCOM, or I see they're enforcing against smaller federated sites, I'll just remove non login readable capability and make it entirely invite only (which won't be a problem, the only people joining for ages were bots and when I added the AI blocking/cloudflare protection they've stopped coming too). Until then I am assuming they're going after the actual social media companies.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 6 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Will this switching become an illegal act?

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  • [โ€“] 26 points 7 months ago

    I don't think so. That would be a hard thing to enforce and rather pointless. Comparing it to other internet regulations like the GDPR, it's not illegal to use a website that doesn't adhere to it. That said, with the amount of stupidity we tend to see in politics, who knows what some countries might do.

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  • [โ€“] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    What may happen is that the websites get blocked by the ISP at request.

    Lemmy does manage to circumvent this by the fact every instance has its own domain and cached content.

    Most likely, 4chan.org will be blocked and a British Firewall will be added.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 7 months ago

    I'm not so sure. I think Parliament's goal is to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction while paying none of the political cost of banning websites. Sure, 4chan isn't popular, but if they win their case (which they will) then a lot of US-based sites will just ignore OFCOM and they won't be able to avoid more unpopular bans if they go the ISP block route.

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