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UK fines Reddit $19 million for using children’s data unlawfully
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Technology
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Y'know, it just occured to me, but this push towards child safety opens up another opportunity for Lemmy to grow at the expense of reddit. If reddit puts in age verification, the kids will still need somewhere to go to get answers to stuff like video game questions and random tech support problems. They won't be able to use major platforms though, they're going to be effectively banned from those. They can't be banned from all of our servers though, that's just impractical. So, they could potentially ask their questions and get answers here if they wanted, assuming we're good enough at providing answers.
The kids would be the ones answering as well, so that shouldn't be a problem.
I know a lot of people here come from Reddit, but I'm sure I'm not the only one here who grew up using old school phpBB forums to talk to other kids about random stuff online after school. My favorite forum was not in English and probably had fewer than 100 active members, and its by far the best experience I've had online. I didn't bother much with other public social media before Mastodon.
I think at least some of us are dreaming of recreating that type of safe and fun online space, where it's possible to create more close-knit (but nevertheless anonymous) communities. Reddit isn't it, and I agree that it's not good for children (or anyone) to be on there.
Whether the Fediverse could provide it remains an open question. It certainly comes with huge moderation challenges.
At some point those same authorites are coming for Lemmy and the metaverse generally.
Sure. The problem is we're too decentralized to make enforcement practical. They can try to come for, say, lemmy.world if they want, that's totally fine. That won't get them very far with all of Lemmy though. Too many servers can be housed in places where western law cannot easily reach, and regulating just those servers located in western countries accomplishes very little.
Advantages of being structured differently.
edit for grammar
The pirate bay, many big private trackers, and Anna's archive are still up despite being felony copyright infringement and directly pissing off fortune 500 companies
We can set it up to be insulated from them though. For one thing, we should have instances with clear rules, an appeals process, and a final decision to be done by a trial of a jury of verified users or the like. To prevent the feds from getting their hooks into the enforcement, and or prevent moderator abuse, which is what drives half of the people to lemmy to begin with.
Idk about setting it up to not have to do age checks, other than setting instances in areas where they are not beholden to the authorities and disguising their own identities as administrators?