Egregoros

People getting pissed that d*scord is voluntarily implementing ID checks miss the point that a lot of governments are pushing for it to be mandatory. D*scord are just getting ahead of the curve.

Before people say it, VPNs will only work to avoid age gates so long as there are territories where platforms don't implement them. If enough places want it, it'll just become the de-facto norm, even in countries that don't require it.

This legislation will expand to affect everyone eventually, even fedi.

@Kagekokoro Doubt they'd make a distinction between federated and centralised. They'd see an instance like mastosoc say "that's social media, where's your age gate?" and expect them to play ball. Trying to get legislators or law enforcement to understand how fedi works is a fools errand. Pretty sure FSE pete still gets strongly worded letters from the FBI demanding he hand over the user information of somebody on a different instance at least once a month.

Exactly what playing ball looks like would depend on the wording of the legislation. Best case scenario, you just gotta age-check your own users, small and single-user instances largely unaffected. Worst case scenario, it completely kills federation, because you'd be expected to age-check every actor fetching your posts. No doubt m*stodon will bend the knee to the EU and implement some BS authorization measure that bricks the rest of the network.