I will disconnect from anything with age verification. My post history and content are more than adequate to prove who I am. I will leave the internet entirely out of ethical disgust. I despise this world of lazy cowards and exploitive criminals. I want nothing to do with it. I will not shrug my shoulders when people come to steal my citizenship, rights, and liberty. Pathetic slaves that roll over to this shit are no better.

Lemmy is going to navigate it by being too small to care about.

I will never verify my identity for any social platform. Period.

So if the fediverse enforces as a whole such measures its future would be one without me in it.

Oh, I won't be verifying my identity, ever. It's basically self-doxxing.

Or I'll host my own server and mark myself as verified. I mean, does one even verify if an ID check was actually conducted? Who would be bothered to check?

I have no desire to attach my social media activities to my IRL identity. I've seen people attacked and get fired for having strong political beliefs. I myself will not visit businesses whose owners have been vocally supportive of certain viewpoints. So I will not participate anywhere that requires verifiable identity, and I think it will be stifling to the point of losing any value. Plus, I'll be honest, I've been around long enough that I've given voice to thoughts that were immature or ignorant or enraged and I'm damn glad I don't have to defend myself on a daily basis and even happier that they aren't associated with my IRL identity.

There are ways to establish an identity without personally identifying information, such as how Mastodon verifies that you have control over a domain. That's as far as I'm willing to go.

Some users will be fine with it, some won't, me included. As for me, I'll just leave any and all instances that will require verification. If all forums start to require verification, I'll just start hosting my own ugly marvelous HTML forum. :D

It is very likely that smaller communities will form, based on the networks of trust. The local feed will begin to mean more, and local-only communities will proliferate.

You could still visit the rest of Fediverse, should you need something specific.

Probably go to IRC again, but the fediverse will be fine.

The people who create mastodon having a discussion about what to do about age verification laws some instances may legally be required to comply with isn't the end of the world.

I wouldn't mind age or "is a person" verification done with privacy protecting means, such as GNU Taler blind signed token solutions that are open source and audited by independent security teams, but that isn't getting implemented. Instead every "verification" service is a literal privacy nightmare simultaneously linking identity to speech and harvesting user data for sale.

Non-EU parts of the world should be encouraged to have better data privacy laws as part of their trade deals with the EU.

In a way I feel this might give us new freedom. I’ve ditched a lot of online stuff over privacy and the amount of time and freedom in your head you get in return is amazing.

Don’t get me wrong the fediverse is a lifesaver when it comes to staying up to date about the stuff that matters to us (privacy, politics, Linux, ssh,…) so there will have to be some solution.

But in the bigger picture, fuck it. Read a book.

Read about the first person project! It is litterally aiming to solve personhood credentials and privacy. UX/adoption will be a problem, but it solves some hard issues in a privacy preserving way : https://www.firstperson.network/ - the first user will be the Linux Foundation.

Can instances be hosted abroad instead? Or are host admins liable as long as they're in an age verification required jurisdiction

It's a non-issue. They try to verify us, we leave. That's the extent of the conversation.

Die with it i suppose

Move the fediverse to the gemini protocol?

Instances subject to the legal systems of jurisdictions with age verification laws probably need the feature to exist to continue operating legally.

I don't think the current structure of any of those laws would require instances to demand verification from other instances, and any instance operator who did such a thing would be socially unacceptable to the current population of the fediverse.

Isn't that kind of like asking a 6 year old what they're going to do when they retire?

P2P will be back back BACK

the original fediverse