Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P

I’m not yet even close to 40, yet I still believe I am one of the “people who built the World Wide Web”, in the sense that I’ve been posting to it for more than 20 years (there are still old forum posts online that I wrote at the age of 10), i.e. before it was something the general public did a lot.

I’m on the one hand proud of how much it has grown and how much more popular it has become; and on the other hand, worried that this has caused governments around the world to pay a lot more attention to it and limit our freedom on it through age verification laws and similar…

Or worded more positively: Stack Overflow is closer to being complete.

multiple operating systems, I’m not so sure but I can’t imagine that it’s impossible

The keyword is virtualization.

??? Highly unclear what exactly you are imagining.

So selling children’s data to advertisers is not affected?

There are provisions in other laws about that, e.g. the GDPR.

I am not American myself.

No, I don’t think the next Congress will be better, but at least procedurally the expiration of Congress is a hurdle to getting it done very soon. Not so in the EU.

At least the current US Congress is going to end in January, probably won’t get this done before the end of the term.

Revenue so far: $0

and let us hope it stays that way

Hopefully. I am already on both sites (though on reddit I hardly ever start new threads and only use it on desktop) and would love getting opportunities to talk about all the topics here that I currently talk about only on reddit.

It is so incredible. I used to think the main threat to a free and open Internet was copyright. Then in the mid-2010s the talking points against it shifted to misinformation and hate speech.

Now it’s age verification? How did we get here?

Mastodon is my main source for finding links to post to Lemmy.

You can do that. It may just flood your timeline.

They can and it has been done, IIRC Friendica or something does that…? (Correct me if I am wrong.)

Even on Lemmy, community mods can see who voted how on which posts and comments.

I’m also getting the same error as you.

I would not do that without first looking into applicable laws regarding legal liability for content and requirements to remove things. Depending on where in the world you are, this can be a minefield.

I think “allen Ernstes” is more accurately translated “in all seriousness”, not “actually”; so: “the moderator here, in all seriousness, deleted…”.

Huh? I don’t know where you get almost any of these ideas from…

As for myself, I thought of the Internet as a much bigger deal when I was mainly on small independent forums. I’ve never participated very much on any corporate social media except maybe reddit, but even on reddit I know I am one of millions.

Yeah, well, you know, that question has been around for almost as long as the WWW: Which laws apply on the Internet, and how do you enforce them if they do?

Lots of politicians would like the answer to be: My country’s laws apply to all websites that can be accessed in my country. If they violate them, my country’s government should be able to fine them, order ISPs to block access to them, arrest people associated with them, maybe even more…

But if that’s the case, then cannot countries like the PRC, Thailand, Iran, North Korea, etc. also do those things? Can we claim they are doing something illegitimate when they do, when self-described liberal democratic republics do them too? Can the Internet even work at all if everyone constantly has to comply with all countries’ laws, most of which they don’t know about?

The business model of mainstream social media companies is that they are ultimately part of the advertising industry. They need some kind of legal presence everywhere that they have customers (advertisers). That legal presence can be fined like any other company, and that is how most laws are currently enforced against them. But those that don’t can do this https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko or even this https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/ and then what do governments do?

https://xkcd.com/810/ was intended as a joke, but there is a kernel of truth to those thoughts…

What do they currently know about the Internet? Are they currently using a microblogging or discussion platform? Difficult to answer this without knowing that.