I seem to remember an instance somewhere had a quite great idea, they would have their admin team request a bottle of wine or similar plus a picture of the payment voucher as a form of adult identification. Their argument was that if someone can legally buy drinks then they are legally adult, and thus they could verify with that without ever requiring any sort of PII.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
86 points (98.9% liked)
Fediverse
41098 readers
117 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is similar to what we've done on aussie.zone. Go to a bar, order the drink, get receipt, write username, take photo. One of the admins spent a bunch of time, and a bot to sort through the photos.
Apparently people were quite creative, i really want there to be a record of that creativity somewhere in the future, sounds so fun.
Maybe they could donate the record of that little episode to some alternative social media museum in a couple decades. I think theres something about the demands of age verification and the creative ways of respecting online privacy that event produced that has some historical value.
This is something that would make for quite an interesting Internet Archive.
A receipt from alcohol purchase seems equally as valid as a govt ID. One could falsify either by just stealing someone else's.
And until these whackadoo politicians decide they're going to provide the tools or other guidance on exactly how to verify someone's age, it seems appropriate.
You could probably pick up a receipt from alcohol purchase from the ground outside any liquor store...
And you could ask any random adult to borrow their ID, as I said.
One requires an adult participant, one doesn't.
Getting a receipt also requires an adult participant. People don't make a habit of tossing alcohol receipts on the ground.
Much more so than passports or other identity documents. Come on, man, what point are you actually arguing here?
I could ask you the same question.
I thought it was quite clear. Verifying your age with an alcohol purchase receipt is a dumb idea for a large variety of reasons, including ease of acquiring one, ease of copying images, ease of printing one yourself and the cumulative ease of doing all this without an actual adult willingly involved in your scheme. It's is not nearly as fool proof as verifying government ID.
Of course, I'm against all invasive forms of age verification. Doesn't mean I'm going to advocate for a rally bad alternative either.
American in shambles having to wait another 3 years to go online
Heh, forgot to account for that!
Americans would only be able yo join once their 21 and German/Austrian people would be able yo join at 16. Hard liquor would fix that, but Americans are another issue.
Yep. As a Fediverse admin that's basically it. Until there are legal or financial consequences there will be no ID verification. If I am forced.... Well my instance will be disabled. Simple as that unfortunately.
I cannot confirm or deny in writing that this is the approach on quokk.au.
Fortunately such laws do not seem forthcoming in my country, and I have yet to see how not following the laws of other countries will be able to meaningfully affect us.
I'm not going to show you my ID, but I can hold an extensive conversation with you about Gaia Online, which should prove my age quite well.
Let us speak now of... The Mighty Orbots.
Based and good