Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
Come to Lemmy. We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.
Funny. I always regarded Reddit and the other centralized platforms as the new internet, and lemmy rather as the old internet. I’m from the BBS days, and although that was not federated, to me the fediverse looks more like it than any commercial platform.
I’ve been predicting for while we’re going to see two parallel Internets develop, the “new” net running on the old infrastructure that’s basically run by the big guys and a new infrastructure modeled after the old internet that’s decentralized. We’ve been seeing a bunch of different pieces from Fediverse to LoRa communication, Meshtastic, Matrix, increased hobbyist interest in old ways of connecting computers (even saw a guide on how to set up your own dial up ISP for fun), etc. I’m not sure exactly how all those pieces are going to come together, but a locked down internet is only going to increase demand for what was lost in its creation. And its already been trending this way for awhile.
Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.
It was probably always the case, that the enshittification was unavoidable already, from the very start, because of the essence of a company: incessant, ever-increasing greed.
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that’s gonna be rough for users. I don’t envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.
Lemmy will likely be affected too: https://hachyderm.io/@ell1e/116844253291555343 At least for the large enough instances or something, I’m not 100% sure about how it works but I read about some micro service exception that may or may not apply to some.
Or, instances can just choose to ignore it. Just host your instance outside the EU. Congrats. You win. Like yeah feddit.org and other imperial core™ instances will likely just shut down but most of lemmy will be absolutely fine.
Worst case scenario host it outside the EU and VPN to a neutral country and you’ll be fine.
bingo.
there have always been countries willing to host content outside the prying eyes of the West. There shouldn’t really be any expectation of that changing.
Hell, if things get really desperate, we can all pitch in for a boat and host via satellite out of international waters. I think PirateBay did something similar for years.
It might be a short-lived safe haven, regarding the US: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online
Good thing that there are other countries outside the EU than just the US.
There are.
But if you get the US, EU and China all requiring ID verification… plus other authoritarian leaning countries like the Saudis and w/e. The odds that like, IDK… Bahamas or Iceland gonna hold the line on this are… long.
Prob not even Canada has the throw weight to do it in the long run. Love you frozen northerners, I got your back in every way I can in this effed up world, but Canada just doesn’t punch in the weight class of the EU, US, and China. Editing: I forgot Canada has Bill C-34, a similar bill to what US and EU are floating.
It’s so, so important for ID reqs not to pass at the national level in the US. There are strange bedfellows tho. It has bipartisan support AND bipartisan opposition. It could also face major 1A challenges here. Time will tell.
I don’t disagree that for most people, this will result in significantly less anonymity on the web and overall is a very dangerous trend.
However, that doesn’t mean that there won’t still be some countries that do not have such laws and that don’t answer to US/EU regulatory attempts. That’s already how many quasi-illegal (or even straight up illegal) websites that operate in such countries (such as circumventing DMCA requests), and these laws are highly unlikely to entirely prevent those from continuing to find safe haven countries.
Yah I do agree there will keep being those quasi gray area legal sites.
But even so, most ppl will live with the ID reqs, since they won’t go to the gray sites. Esp if the heavy hitters like US/EU go down the China road of hardcore clamping down on VPNs. In China today, some ppl get around that. It’s just very risky, so most ppl give up and use what the gov wants them to. I’m afraid we could eventually see a similar story in the US and EU. Also I forgot that Canada has a bill pending too, Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”.
IDK how the US bill will go. I am trying to remain hopeful. It sounds like it passed the House, but could be DOA in the Senate. And even if it passes the Senate, it’ll be hit with 1A lawsuits and go before SCOTUS. We can’t count our chickens yet or let off the pressure, but it has hurdles to clear before it becomes law of the land.