With the worldwide wave of social media bans on major platforms aka digital verification, I wonder if we'll see an influx of people to the Fediverse?

🤞🤞🤞 here is hoping <3

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Quite hard to enforce that given even with growth, it would be federated.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don't follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it's not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.

Between server costs, moderation effort, discussions whether certain instances should be defederated, and existing legal requirements (like removal requests for copyrighted or illegal material), hosting an instance is already a thankless job and most admins do it for free. The last thing we need is uncontrolled growth that attracts lawmakers' attention as well as users that don't share our values and require even more moderation.

Let the fediverse grow naturally. We don't need to shut anyone out but we shouldn't actively advertise to the whole world either. Recruit your friends who might be interested in the content and culture we already have. Let the rest of the world find their own thing. That way, we can maybe stay under the radar for a couple more years before the problems start.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don’t follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it’s not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.

Lol, Ofcom still are stuck trying to ban 4chan. You overestimate their ability.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

And you overestimate the amount of bullshit the average instance admin is willing to put up with. Sure there will be a few instances who can afford lawyers, offshore servers, whatever. But the majority are hobbyists who think this whole fediverse thing is neat as long as it costs a few bucks for an off the shelf web host and a bit of free time to moderate. And if those people get legal threats, they will either comply or get out because running an instance with 100 users is just not worth the risk of ruining your life.

The fediverse wouldn't die completely but it would for sure lose many smaller instances. We've already lost larger ones like lemm.ee for less.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

They don't need to lawyer up if they have no presence in the UK. They can just send them a meme picture of a hamster.

Lemm.ee shut down for entirely unrelated reasons.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I knew that lemmy having the issue of instance identity being tied to DNS was going to eventually bite it in the ass.

It if weren't for that, it'd be as easy as migrating the instance to a different jurisdiction. Which, speaking of, is a whack-a-mole game; what we need is to set up shop in some sort of international waters jurisdiction or something that has enough soverengity and amicability that assures say the UK can't legally threaten it anymore than they can threaten a random online-delivery donut shop in Laos.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

Ofcom don't know what the Fediverse is.