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.

@VD15 @Kagekokoro There's a much better way for the worst case scenario. Mastodon has been working on Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider Specifications, which basically means a plugin system that third parties can implement so that Mastodon can use them in various parts of federation. If for example the EU would want to censor fediverse the same way they enforce censorship on Xitter/Facebook/..., they would now have the perfect scapegoat for that. Sponsor a service for an automod/age verifier based on the specification and enforce its use via some regulation like the DSA (which already touches moderation).

I already talked about that here among other threads: https://fluffytail.org/objects/568cb4e7-5aa3-4463-8851-34b258177b0b