Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
Be prepared for rapid growth on lemmy. It will lead to growing pains. This has happened several times before and regularly happens on mastodon etc
Can confirm. Just prepared an account and selected my communities. Have spent too much time on reddit with half a mil karma if that matters, just proof of the time spend there, but I am not giving my ID to social media…
How can you walk away from that many internet points?
Haha, never cares tbh, just a proof of time invested, nothing else for me.
Yeah ID shouldn’t be a requirement to write some bullshit online, like wtf doesn’t anyone realize it’s ridiculous
just saying this out loud is crazy … i need to identify myself to read and write!
everybody needs to be on their best behavior for the next few weeks ok
Come to Lemmy. We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that’s gonna be rough for users. I don’t envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.
Lemmy will likely be affected too: https://hachyderm.io/@ell1e/116844253291555343 At least for the large enough instances or something, I’m not 100% sure about how it works but I read about some micro service exception that may or may not apply to some.
Or, instances can just choose to ignore it. Just host your instance outside the EU. Congrats. You win. Like yeah feddit.org and other imperial core™ instances will likely just shut down but most of lemmy will be absolutely fine.
Worst case scenario host it outside the EU and VPN to a neutral country and you’ll be fine.
It might be a short-lived safe haven, regarding the US: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online
Good thing that there are other countries outside the EU than just the US.
There are.
But if you get the US, EU and China all requiring ID verification… plus other authoritarian leaning countries like the Saudis and w/e. The odds that like, IDK… Bahamas or Iceland gonna hold the line on this are… long.
Prob not even Canada has the throw weight to do it in the long run. Love you frozen northerners, I got your back in every way I can in this effed up world, but Canada just doesn’t punch in the weight class of the EU, US, and China.
It’s so, so important for ID reqs not to pass at the national level in the US. There are strange bedfellows tho. It has bipartisan support AND bipartisan opposition. It could also face major 1A challenges here. Time will tell.
I don’t disagree that for most people, this will result in significantly less anonymity on the web and overall is a very dangerous trend.
However, that doesn’t mean that there won’t still be some countries that do not have such laws and that don’t answer to US/EU regulatory attempts. That’s already how many quasi-illegal (or even straight up illegal) websites that operate in such countries (such as circumventing DMCA requests), and these laws are highly unlikely to entirely prevent those from continuing to find safe haven countries.
Yah I do agree there will keep being those quasi gray area legal sites.
But even so, most ppl will live with the ID reqs, since they won’t go to the gray sites. Esp if the heavy hitters like US/EU go down the China road of hardcore clamping down on VPNs. In China today, some ppl get around that. It’s just very risky, so most ppl give up and use what the gov wants them to. I’m afraid we could eventually see a similar story in the US and EU. Also I forgot that Canada has a bill pending too, Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”.
IDK how the US bill will go. I am trying to remain hopeful. It sounds like it passed the House, but could be DOA in the Senate. And even if it passes the Senate, it’ll be hit with 1A lawsuits and go before SCOTUS. We can’t count our chickens yet or let off the pressure, but it has hurdles to clear before it becomes law of the land.
bingo.
there have always been countries willing to host content outside the prying eyes of the West. There shouldn’t really be any expectation of that changing.
Hell, if things get really desperate, we can all pitch in for a boat and host via satellite out of international waters. I think PirateBay did something similar for years.
Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.
Funny. I always regarded Reddit and the other centralized platforms as the new internet, and lemmy rather as the old internet. I’m from the BBS days, and although that was not federated, to me the fediverse looks more like it than any commercial platform.
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Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.
It was probably always the case, that the enshittification was unavoidable already, from the very start, because of the essence of a company: incessant, ever-increasing greed.
I wonder how that’ll work with RSS and old Reddit. That’s all I use when reading Reddit
I read somewhere recently that old reddit will require you to be signed in. 🫤
Edit: found it.
Read-only use of old reddit was the only way I use it. There are actualyl some good resources for niche topics. You can search, like how do I disassemble my electric toothbrush to replace the battery the mfg sealed into the unit. Somebody prob posted about it. Or weird game trivia. W/e.
Read only searching was the best remaining use for reddit. Which will now die.
Same. That is all that I would use Reddit for nowadays
The website includes a quote from a Reddit employee:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
I didn’t realize casually browsing a website is “abusive scraping”. Isn’t that the equivalent of claiming that reading a news article online is “abusive scraping”?
That quote doesn’t say that casually browsing is abusive scraping. I really hate that you’re making me defend Reddit here, but two things can be true at the same time: you use it for casual browsing, and it is a significant source of abusive scraping for them.
That is true, two things can be true at once. I sometimes fail to realize that.
I just dropped reddit some time ago… Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
A day may come when I upload my ID, and verify my identity online, but it is not this day.
If you’re in the EU, it might come sooner than you think: https://leminal.space/post/37117472
I’m in the US. Honestly, if things keep going like this here, in Canada, and in the EU, I might have to move to Norway or Switzerland or something.
Regarding Switzerland: https://www.privately.eu/post/swiss-safetytech-setting-the-standard-in-privacy-first-age-estimation-technology-greatly-reducing-the-need-for-id-checks
I think the only way we’re getting out of this is if people start protesting to their representatives way louder and in way greater numbers.
For anybody reading in the EU, consider emailing one of your representatives and demand they undo this age verification surveillance stuff: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates (Site is unrelated, it just happens to have a list of representatives.)
For anybody in the US, find your representatives here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Will they even listen to us?
Hmm. They will. They’ll listen through all of our internet-enabled devices with microphones.
I feel very hopeless about this.
If you haven’t contacted a representative yet, I suggest you do it. After that, it’s time to continue with the hopelessness 😵💫 relatable for sure…
So “13 year olds, immutable secure setting because you are a child and we cant get as much wealth from you anyway.” But “16-17 year olds, you’re still a child, but if you wanna do some more stuff we’re not gonna stop you.”
I’m in the US, but still, maybe getting booted off of there was the universe trying to tell me something.
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online Consider acting now if you don’t want it to come to other US platforms, too…
They’re used to people screaming fuck no and doing it anyway.
They sure will if everyone rolls over without even trying to protest. Consider contacting your representative: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Or for the EU: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates
It’ll be like Facebook. The inertia and the sense of everyone doing it will keep Reddit alive. Even though it’s estimated that 50-60% is bot activity.
why are people blaming reddit instead of EU ? (i dont like reddit either )
Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).
oh yeah i agree , the eu governments can implement a service where they do the age verification themselves but i think they do this on purpose because they work for US and the whole thing is for surveilling and spying on people
The whole Stop Killing Games debacle clearly showed us that the EU, despite its rhetoric, isn’t interested in championing consumer rights in the slightest.
There are many who think there’s no sufficiently secure, risk-free way to do that verification.
See this write-up about the EU wallet: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/13
Or Cory Doctorow on Age Verification of any kind: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
I live in the EU, this his honestly the first I’ve seen age verification on any platform.
As far as I can tell, it’s not Reddit’s fault: https://leminal.space/post/37117472 But I could be wrong. Read the details for yourself, and if you don’t like it then consider contacting your representative to complain (this isn’t ChatControl related but they have a useful contact list).
LinkedIn (Microsoft) has also been slowly introducing identity verification, and they’re also using Persona.
Persona has also been used for several years now by American companies hiring EU citizens, to verify their job history and background.
I’m betting that Persona “forgetting” your information is bullshit, and whenever you use them they add more of your info to your profile. They’d have your job history, your LinkedIn activity, your Reddit activity etc.
Something I never see anyone talk about, is how, with all the ‘fingerprinting’ and data collection/analysis these companies do, they already know whether you’re 18 or not. I know this isn’t actually about “protecting the children”, but I’d still like to hear more discussion from the angle of: they already surveil us enough for this purpose.
Me -> NAL. So I’m only guessing.
One prob might be that fingerprinting IDs a device. There could be a 70 yo and a 7 yo using the same dev in the same house. It prob wouldn’t stand up in court when Little Billy, 7, became a victim because Grandpa Wilson, 70, used the same device. Or the old dev fingerprint gets used with a new account. They let the account in b/c they know the fingerprint. But they never knew the dev was sold to a new owner who is 15.
Fingerprinting is way more powerful than most ppl realize. But it does have limits. If the EU, or the US, comes at them, they need something straighforward and easy to explain to a jury. If Little Billy forged a photo ID, that’s a solid defense for the co. But if they screw up with hard to explain statistical methods, they have more legal risk.
I understand this argument, but I don’t think it’s anymore “foolproof”. How often are you going to have to present ID? Every hour?
God fuck this
Actually good. Now people don’t have to worry if some minor is pretending to be an adult on their NSFW subs.
On the other hand, adults getting ID’d for Palantir purposes sucks.
If this was done at the ISP level then it would work, but they won’t.
That would be even more dystopian however. There doesn’t seem to be any good way to do age verification for big internet services without basically removing all anonymity online. Zero knowledge proof doesn’t seem to necessarily save you either, see Cory Doctorow talking about it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
The porn is going to go away or be way lower quality. People are not going to post stolen pornographic content on account tied to their real identity.
On the other hand, adults getting ID’d for Palantir purposes sucks.
What do you mean? Handing over a detailed registry og millions of people’s political opinions, sexual preferences and medical histories to a fascist oligarch with a creepy Messiah complex is a small price to pay to make it harder for 16 year olds to look at titties.
Very brave of you to assume this will actually work.
It’s amazing you think you’re immune to this 🤣 or think the admins are going to go to jail protecting identites.
The second any instance hits enough users to draw attention they’ll crumble faster than a quarter miles top fuel dragster.
Literally no. Lemmy admins should shutdown the instance before implementing age restriction. And I’m not sure if lemmy will ever get that popular.
Oh I’m sure that’ll happen 👌👍
Also you can simply chose to not give away your identity and switch to a different instance. If you dont trust any instance you can just selfhost one. Lemmy is resistant to these kind of attacks due to its decentralised nature.
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll survive hundreds of rounds of multiple owners getting shut down 🙄
What are you even trying to say? Can you please remove your sarcasm and make an argument I can understand?
People could create overseas instances that dont have age restriction. Stop being so righteous and sarcastic and actually engage in a conversation.
No instances have to be shut down, if Lemmy world asks users to perform age verification, I’ll just move my account to sh.itjust.works and those who are ok with giving strangers their ID can stay on Lemmy.world. And so on and so forth until you find an instance that you trust that doesn’t live in a jurisdiction that bends the knee
Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It’s not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it’s prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).
Wow can’t wait for the influx of 12-17 year olds on Lemmy.
Some really valuable perspective… They can tell us when it’s curtains for Zoosha
