To be fair to the tech companies, the government has really left them holding the ball on this thing they didn’t ask for. The government did a little bit of age verification testing, found it was occasionally actuate in certain circumstances for a small portion of the population, then said good enough and told the tech companies to figure it out or we’ll fine you millions. The government then goes around taking all the credit for pretending to do something about “protecting” children and will just blame the tech companies when it all goes to shit. At the end of the day, it’s only stopping them from having accounts, they can still watch all the trash on YouTube and tiktok logged out and will be fingerprinted by their device to tune the algorithm.
I’m already fully prepared for all my social media accounts to be deleted (because there’s no way in hell I’m giving google my ID).
If they go after Steam or my Email then I’d be in trouble, but I think those’ll be fine.
I’ve got some accounts hanging around that were basically name sitting.
What they don’t realise is:
- i won’t go through any sort of age verification hoopla. At all. I’ll just abandon the apps and accounts.
- I will now actively tell people “I don’t use XMetaWhatTok anymore. If you want to contact me, please use AltFreeNoAgeVerificationApp instead”
I might even just point people to a private email and a private news server lmao.
I’m interested in what you mean when you refer to a private news server? Do you mean like the Guardian app; or do you mean some sort of RSS set up; or is it some self hosted thing?
I’m interested because i have an idea for a news reposting site fed by an RSS feed, but maybe you use an equivalent system i’m not aware of.
I meant news as in nntp/usenet server.
nntp is so old school it became old school before school became old 😁
Ooh, not sure i should’ve asked this question! I really don’t get what i’m looking at here. Thats why i’ve taken so long to reply.
The server-user diagram seems a bit like the structure of Activitypub. I think the use of the word ‘news’ is throwing me as well, they’re not using the word news in the common ‘news organisation delivers articles in some form’ sense but using the word in a more broad sense? So how is this different from Activitypub, maybe less open/connected? But its the connected servers that communicate with the Activitypub protocol as well.
TBH, I haven’t paid much attention to the workings of ActivityPub etc to comment. I’m just an oblivious end user nowadays 😀
If I really wanted to set up something like that nowadays, I’d probably use something like Lemmy anyways. news servers were basically abandoned for discussion forums hosted separately on websites, and they evolved into various social media etc. And here we are, recreating the wheel again!
Now I’m getting nostalgic. Maybe I should go hunting around usenet archives for my first post. Hahahaaa! Me so old…
The ITEE department at my uni had a newsgroup. One professor actually actively used it for his course, circa 2015. That was pretty much the only time I ever used it.
On Meta, it will be through Yoti’s facial assurance check, which requires users to take a video selfie to assess their age.
Can I send a video of the hair on my cock instead?
How about I prove I’m old by not taking a selfie.
How about they look at my account creation date and then eat the entirety of my arse
We all know that nearly all of us will be ping’d for verification. That’ll let em get our ID and add another data point. I say they’re throthing at the upcoming data rush.
I honestly doubt it. They’ve got very little to gain from it, and huge risk to reputation if they do it and then get hacked.
They don’t care about reputation in any way. It’ll be a small fine of a few million and they’ll rub their hands for that cheap data.
Yeah, just look at Discord. Not only harvesting data, by sharing it with “trusted partners” I was told the Esafety commissioner can bring legal action to find companies up to $850k per offence for improperly storing Australian citizens data, but I haven’t heard anything about hundreds of millions in fines against Discord yet.
What do you lot use for group chats? For some reason my social circle decided facebook messenger is the goto. This could be the chance to get them off it. We’ve tried to setup a signal chat in the past, and there is some interest, but the lack of chat history deters new users. I don’t think we need that level of encryption going on.
Trillian is still there and still great
I also mostly use Facebook Messenger. In theory at least Messenger should be unaffected by this, since it’s a chat app, not “social media”. How that will play out in practice, with most Messenger accounts being tied to a Facebook account, is…unclear.
My other big chat app currently is Discord. I’ve recently started trying to convert one of my Discord groups onto Matrix. Matrix seems pretty good for this kind of thing. It can do one-on-one chats, group chats, and Discord-like “Spaces” with multiple different Rooms. For those less tech-inclined, just don’t explain any of the federation details, just go to matrix.org.
Cheers, I was thinking a Discord style platform would work well but don’t want to swap one closed system for another. Matrix looks good - with different rooms in spaces, public or invite only access, email only sign up. One issue with signal is also that everybody uses secretive usernames - not great for friendly neighbourhood community chats. But it looks like some Matrix clients have multi-account support, so that could fix that. Do you know if theres any sort of cap on user numbers? I’m envisioning around 50-150 users for events/requests/etc.
The group I’m looking to migrate is much, much smaller than that, so it’s not something I’ve considered. But a quick search tells me that it should be fine with those numbers.
There is chat history, you just have to back it up
Ah i meant history of what’s come before. When a new user joins, they just see a blank void, not a great first impression
Ahhh I see.
I mean, who’s reading the chat history anyway?
If you add someone to a chat you should say hello! Problem solved.
Further, people are already used to this with WhatsApp which functions on the same protocol (with Meta harvesting the metadata and connections of course)
So the good news is that, despite the legislation saying it should apply to all social media sites, the actual regulation seems to only be being applied to certain designated platforms. Which is actually an excellent approach.
As for how it will work. Still nobody has been very clear. It’s likely companies will use profiling to estimate users’ age, and many people will simply not need to do anything to keep using it. If you do get detected as underage, facial recognition or uploading photo ID seems likely to be the only option.
Meta will use facial recognition provided by “Yoti” or photo ID.
Tiktok said it would have “a simple appeals process”. No further detail.
Google has not given any indication as to whether it will even comply with the ban, but has threatened legal action to determine if it is even lawful.
Snap and Kick say they will comply, but have not yet shared any details about how.
X and Reddit have not given any comment.
All other platforms are, as yet, exempt.
It’s likely companies will use profiling to estimate users’ age, and many people will simply not need to do anything to keep using it
I wonder if I can preemptively add some activity to my profile to feign this, like add ‘married’ as a status and subscribe to insurance companies.
I’m just hoping the fact that my account is, like…15(?) years old will be a pretty clear sign that I’m over 16.
They’ve been really unclear and flip flopping but YouTube has already demanded I age verify.
Ugh, we are in the “find out” stage?
How is this even constitutional? You don’t protect your minors?
