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I'm all pro Age Verification, the good old "If you are over 18 click yes"

If I setup my own private instance and don't make myself verify my age.. can they still stop me from following others or other instances following me in some way?

It would only ever be instances specific would it not?

We shut migratie everything to I2P and Tor.

Don't be lawful evil, be neutral good. Or even chaotic good.

I am failing to see how the highlighted text is saying that they will implement it. My understanding is that they are evaluating yhe situation. Am I wrong?

I mean... They have to.

Countries are making it law, so sooner or later, fedi projects are going to have to deal with that crap.

It doesn't say what they're planning to do about laws requiring age verification. It says they're forming a group to figure that out. The problem with bad legislation is you can't just ignore it, so they need to at least work out an approach. In itself this news is neutral, but we'll have to see what they decide.

So, they are basically announcing that they are

forming a committee

to figure out

how to talk about

how to understand the stuff?

...Honestly, it could have been a lot worse.

fedi users try not to overreact challenge (impossible)

When you get big enough, you are under more scrutiny and these laws are spreading more and more. I can imagine the Mastodon team is under lots of external pressure to start following these new laws. Mastodon won't be the last to start thinking about implementation.

I hope it's face verification so I can just point the camera at a guy on Google images or whatever to get it to let me in.

Could it be best way to provide legal liability for how to comply with vague and easy to misinterpret badly-written law is to have a process underway at your organization to examine it? Just move slowly till the bigger guys lawyers figure it out?

Everyone on today’s internet is directly exposed to regulations like GDPR, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and lately numerous age verification (or assurance) laws and related social media bans for minors.

How, how, how did we manage to stray this far from John Perry Barlow's dreams? Is there any good left in the world? ;_;

I think going out an meeting people IRL is what I will go for next.

This is a real leopards ate MY face?!? moment for much of the fediverse.

Yeah turns out there are consequences to rightously bandwagoning on moral panics....

I would be totally down for some trustworthy and transparent verification service that does not store or hand out your data. Since pretty much everyone will need to verify for whatever at some point, I think this would be awesome to have

I don't think that means they're planning on doing age verification. Mastodon and anyone running a Mastodon instance has to operate within whatever legal regime their country imposes. I interpet the above as putting some work towards figuring out ways to do that. If a country mandates age verification and Mastodon has no ability whatsoever to comply, then Mastodon becomes illegal in that country. Maybe we don't care about that for a few countries here and there. If that happens in the EU however, that'd be a problem and a likely blow to the Fediverse.