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Joined 2 days ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2026

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  • It reeks of a coordinated agenda,

    It is a coordinated agenda, just not a secret one like people want to think. It’s being pushed by Meta and a string of popular app makers and games to avoid having to be responsible for their own platforms.

    Therefore, some Fediverse instances, may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking.

    That’s a strange argument to me. That’s exactly what Meta is intending to prevent from having to do by pushing these laws. If countries and states pass laws like the California law specifically, then no fediverse instance will need to worry about age verification. They just ask the user’s browser to ask the OS. California’s version of the law would really help small businesses and small developers, because it puts all the child protection responsibility onto the OS.

    Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with?

    In this case, “kid friendly content” becomes “any content that the website wants to be responsible and liable for letting users that report being <18 have access to”.


  • My biggest frustration with the community is not that people don’t like the proposed solution but that

    1. There is so much flat denial that there is actually a major online child predator problem, and/or
    2. No one should be held responsible to fix it, and/or
    3. no one is offering alternative solutions.

    I’m really not upset with individual users here. I understand that you are removed from the problem and don’t understand it. I really don’t blame you personally. I have had training on youth protection and it’s not an easy problem, and just throwing the parents under the bus isn’t fair. When it comes to child predators, they are often just as much the victims as the kids are. (Yes, I mean that.)

    I’m upset with the EFF. They don’t have an excuse for their ignorance. They’ve been taught the problem many times and just refuse to acknowledge it. (Red flag if there ever was one, if you ask me.) If they didn’t like the verification rules then they need to start proposing alternative solutions (which they don’t have).



  • If their goal is to find an excuse to declare you a terrorist then there are much easier ways to do that that are already available to them. This really isn’t an efficient way to do that.

    And, as best as I’m aware, no age verification laws anywhere threaten any consequences for the user. The consequences are only for the OS makers.

    (Granted, the California law, at least, could be read to say that it’s the entity installing the OS to confirm ages, not necessarily the OS maker. So for most Linux distros that would shift the user age verification responsibility completely to the user installing the OS, but I’m not sure how that would work out in courts or whether websites and applications would recognize that. It will probably never actually be an issue that is adjudicated.)



  • I don’t think that COPPA says that companies can’t collect data on kids l at all. Just that there are limitations on how they can use that data while the kids are still kids. When the kids grow up then the previously collected data is fair game. (Why the do you think Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, etc. are so willing to invest in “for Kids” products?)

    And, we’ll probably disagree on this, but I generally think that people and companies that provide a service are responsible for that service. That includes the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and Lemmy hosts. And everyone in between. (Including parents, but the responsibility is no only on them alone.)


  • I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.

    The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.

    If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”

    That’s it.