I’ve been thinking. Every mainstream social media is age verificated now. But sites such as SomethingAwful, 4chan and the Fediverse weren’t. So why are we trying to populate it if the Fedi’ was popular too, we would ALSO be verificated and spywared (made up this word for this post’s sake)?
What law? Where? How could it even be enforced on something completely decentralized?
They could go after some locally hosted instances I guess but the federated platforms as a whole do not have a “home base” and trying to enforce such a rule would be difficult if not impossible in practice (never mind that age verification was never about protecting anybody).
You openly defy it. Fuck you, Make me. Jurisdiction hop, darknets, etc.
The way the internet was meant to be.
This is completely wrong
Age Verification laws have nothing to do with Fediverse “popularity”
They have only to do with the political jurisdiction of your instance, and the political jurisdiction of you as a viewer
I’m pretty sure ze’s (accurately) talking about how many of the enacted age verification régimes only mandate it for platforms with certain amounts of monthly active users.
Decentralization may help, and not profiting off targeted advertising too I think.
The reason we lost a big chunk of the old forums over the past few years is due to much of this stuff too, but I think the fediverse may be a little more malleable to weather storms.
One can migrate accounts across servers, move to different jurisdictions, roll your own server and the interact across different fediverse platforms.
Afair Mastodon were looking to integrate email as a way to both get content and post content which could also help accessibility.
Technically, they all fall under those rules in places like the EU already, those rules just aren’t being enforced.
Long-term, the Fediverse isn’t a social media platform, the instances are platforms, and they just connect to each other. I’d only expect enforcement on the few instances that are “large”, like a million users in size or more.
If instances choose to comply, either by capping users or shutting down, it could be good for decentralization of the network.
Or if there’s a problem. Even the smallest instance is likely to face enforcement if some issue makes headlines. And law enforcement isn’t likely to care that it’s just one instance
In one description I saw, part of the criterion was algorithmic feeds i.e. viewer manipulation. Lemmy has a fairly wimpy form of that compared to something like Facebook, and it could be shut off entirely without any loss. If it were up to me I’d shut it off either way.
Well, the software is written and the network is ran by the people who use it. So we’d be age-verifying and spywaring ourselves!?
Age Verification laws, if they are ever enforced against the fediverse, will be enforced against instances, rather than the fediverse as a whole. So the federales will come for feddit.online, or lemmy.world or mastodon.social. The trouble is, to get the fediverse writ large taken down, you have to get every instance down all at once, otherwise the instances will just keep federating content between them. This seems impractical and kind of unlikely to succeed.
The beauty of the Fediverse. It’s distributed!
Then what’s to stop them from making a law forbidding doxxing-law-abiding instances from federating with instances that don’t force users to doxx themselves?
Perhaps they could. I’m just not clever enough to know how you would draft the legislation or enforce the law – how is a complaint instance supposed to identify a noncomplaint instance, short of checking everyone’s id again?
The key word being “instance” - they’d have a helluva time trying to take down the whole thing altogether. Much like pirate sites, chop one head off & two more will take its place. Communities will just migrate & reestablish footing elsewhere. If the feds do it enough, then backup plans will become automatic where instances back each other up.
Sure you can make the technology more resilient but if the enforcement is punitive enough then it won’t matter.
Which nation has what it takes to shut down 30,000+ Fediverse servers worldwide?
Which federal state has?
You really think Mississippi State Police can take down even only one Misskey or CherryPick server running in Japan?
Yeah, well, you know, that question has been around for almost as long as the WWW: Which laws apply on the Internet, and how do you enforce them if they do?
Lots of politicians would like the answer to be: My country’s laws apply to all websites that can be accessed in my country. If they violate them, my country’s government should be able to fine them, order ISPs to block access to them, arrest people associated with them, maybe even more…
But if that’s the case, then cannot countries like the PRC, Thailand, Iran, North Korea, etc. also do those things? Can we claim they are doing something illegitimate when they do, when self-described liberal democratic republics do them too? Can the Internet even work at all if everyone constantly has to comply with all countries’ laws, most of which they don’t know about?
The business model of mainstream social media companies is that they are ultimately part of the advertising industry. They need some kind of legal presence everywhere that they have customers (advertisers). That legal presence can be fined like any other company, and that is how most laws are currently enforced against them. But those that don’t can do this https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko or even this https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/ and then what do governments do?
thats not how it works. there is no company. if your server tries to age gye me, i’ll just use another.
I’ll run my own is also an option.
Sure, if you want to be a criminal…
.uɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ uɐ ǝq oʇ ʇuǝɯǝɹᴉnbǝɹ ɐ sᴉ ʇɐɥ⊥
The way things are looking now, your only option might be a server in North Korea.
From what I understood of how the federation works it would be rather difficult to enforce it if anyone can run their own instance.
It wouldn’t - it should already.
Why, you ask? Because these laws almost always appear to be first and foremost tools of surveillance and control, not for legitimate reasons, so everyone’s in these laws’ scopes. It’s just easier to go for the bigger players first, or even the US companies as they need to respect the laws of countries they operate in by American law too.
Flying under the radar can only delay the problem so much, so if it concerns you, or whomever else for that matter, do push against these laws, and understand people need to be as resilient as those pushing in favor of these laws.
You can just join another instance that is outside the jurisdiction of these laws or run your own instance with closed sign ups since you don’t have to verify your own age (or the age of known friends if you offer access to them)
The fediverse is inherently resilient to this sort of law, it’s the laws that make platforms liable for the content posted to it, that are more of a concern for the fediverse.
It can but then again to counter it we have hash based protocols like reticulum and nostr
In theory, yes, but it would have to scale up significantly in order to be noticed. And then since it would be split across many difference instances would be a logistical nightmare for authorities.
