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)?

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[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 51 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Well, Russia blocked an LGBT Mastodon instance two years ago, and the FBI seized a Mastodon instance in the US a year before that, so there's already precedent for the blocking or seizure of Fediverse instances.

[–] WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sure you can make the technology more resilient but if the enforcement is punitive enough then it won't matter.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

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?

[–] meaansel@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?

[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 2 points 1 month ago

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?

[–] phillycodehound@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

The beauty of the Fediverse. It's distributed!