cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48234252
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
I actually hope the fediverse doesn’t grow too rapidly. Otherwise we will also be forced to implement age verification.
Quite hard to enforce that given even with growth, it would be federated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lemm.ee issue was lack of mods and no one applying when they asked multiple times a year.
Which boils down to „running an instance is hard and thankless work“ and with more users and more legal restrictions it will only get worse.
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.
Ofcom don’t know what the Fediverse is.
I’m actually afraid the opposite might actually happen.
if users (especially new potential users to the Fediverse.) find that social media requires them to id verifiy most of them will probably just either stick to a narrow smaller few of sites they know people use, or they’l obsolete themselves from the social media aspects of the internet entirely.
And I’m afraid of the opposite: that most will just upload their IDs everywhere and allow “you don’t have to worry if you have nothing to hide” to become accepted stance
That’s the most likely scenario.
Yeah, for Facebook. Will people trust smaller sites like Piefed.zip, in droves?
They probably won’t even start looking for them
Doubtful - Lemmy’s userbase continues to shrink or at best hold steady, and while PieFed continues to keep doubling in size, its total subscriber count remains a moderate fraction of Lemmy’s.
On the other hand, the tools keep getting better - excruciatingly slowly, but consistently nonetheless.
