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)?
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.
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.
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.
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?