I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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And of course, even if they did, tech savvy kids can just self-host an instance on their own computer.
Comply or be defederated !
We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we're SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!
Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn't need anymore "protecting".
Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally "protected" anyone but himself, it's purely a coincidence.
This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.
"I told you so" just doesn't feel so good when what's happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever "oppressed group" of the day is in vogue.
I’m so so very tired of being right.
Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don't know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.
What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.
Right wing people have screeched about "the intolerant left" forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.
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If a government wants this in place, they should also facilitate the means.
Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.
But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.
That sounds like a very functional and rational solution to the problem of age verification. But age verification isn't the ultimate goal, it's mass surveillance, which your solution doesn't work for.
The fact that they haven't gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it's a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal. The goal is to associate your real identity with all the information data brokers have on you, and make that available to state security services and law enforcement. And to do this they will gradually make it impossible to use the internet until they have your ID.
We really need to move community-run sites behind Tor or into i2p or something similar. We need networks where these laws just can't practically be enforced and information can continue to circulate openly.
The other day my kid wanted me to tweak the parental settings on their Roblox account. I tried to do so and was confronted by a demand for my government-issued ID and a selfie to prove my age. So I went to look at the privacy policy of the company behind it, Persona. Here's the policy, and it's without a doubt the worst I've ever seen. It basically says they'll take every last bit of information about you and sell it to everyone, including governments.
https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-policy
So I explained to my kid that I wasn't willing to do this. This is a taste of how everything will be soon.
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If you know anyone who support age verifications laws remind them that the same governments that care so much about kids is backing and arming israel to murder and starve kids to death.
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I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn't really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don't know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don't seem to understand that either.
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Hey, UK! When you are being compared to Mississippi, you are fucking up very very badly.
I don't see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That's just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.
Watch the whole world go "ahaha age verification go brrrrr" in the next months/years, and we'll talk again. I'm particularly baffled at the EU that was all "privacy friendly, consumer first" until a handful of month ago.
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