Comment on Important News - Geoblocking of the UK
swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 3 days agoGiven the size of the feddit instance, the general geolocation of the users, and that most fedi users are at least somewhat technically switched on - your position is even less enviable than Demigodrick’s.
As a user, all the verification options suggested in legislation are unacceptable. Sites that implement such checks would also become unacceptable by association. I’d rather see a hard lesson taught, as this instance has chosen to do.
Comply and upset the users. Dont comply and upset the gov. The users don’t have a stick with which to beat you, so I suppose for you compliance it is. Do you yet what compliance is going to look like for feddit?
A large portion of users tend to come in waves, fleeing what they see as overbearing bad behaviour from their previous homes. I am one of them. I expect a lot of users will migrate to less discerning instances if your compliance method doesn’t pass the sniff test, and I can’t forsee any method managing that and keeping in line with legislation.
If you see a significant enough level of migration, would you bite the bullet and just shut up shop for the UK anyway? What’s the point in investing in compliance methods if the core userbase decides to move away?
Sorry for the jaded speculative babble, I’m just really interested in seeing how this is all going to pan out.
Emperor@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Behind what we are currently doing (NSFW filter on, Lemmy’s own systems, ways to contact Admins directly and AutoMod), so far I think we need:
The law isn’t designed to be onerous for small website owners (and that is pretty much anyone whose membership isn’t in the upper 100s of thousands) and all of the above should exceed the requirements. If not, then it demonstrates we’ve done our homework and improved our processes and documentation (which it seems is the laws intent - it forces you to think about the issues and what you can do about it, when you may have been muddling on through until now), so we are opening a dialogue with The Powers That Be and if there is room for improvement they will let us know, rather than having to get threatening.
I really don’t see it coming to that. It should make no difference to the users of the site. It’s a bit of a time sink for Admins at the moment but, once it is done, it should, hopefully, only require the odd tweak at most.
swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Thanks for taking the time, very informative :)
I suppose a lot of it comes down to how nsfw is handled. If there are no means to access it on the home instance, then what you’re doing is probably A-OK.
That’s assuming the filter is locked on and any communities that fall into (or are likely to) the target categories are prevented from forming or expunged where they already exist. No need for invasive methods to verify age if there’s nothing to verify for.
The only problem I can see would be other federated instances that may feed poorly filtered or flat out unfiltered/untagged nsfw into yours. I imagine that’s going to be a decent chunk of the risk assessment, given that federation with others is the main point of lemmy as a whole.
Emperor@feddit.uk 2 days ago
It was the decision of the original Admin but it has made life easier (as in the CSAM spam attacks - we don’t need to figure out if it’s real or not, if it’s porn, it’s gone) and will make complying with the OSA simpler. I suspect there’s a way to navigate those waters but I am focused on our own needs to get this boxed off and then I’ll have a ponder on that topic. We’ve been discussing this with DGR for a while now and that is the main hurdle we’ve struggled with.
It’s like porn spam - it gets flagged up quickly and dealt with. One bonus of federation is that if it is removed from the home instance it is gone for us too, so it often gets sorted before we even realise there’s a problem.
The OSA document we’ll post is 50% risk assessment, 50% mitigation - the law accepts that, in spite of your best efforts, shit happens, the more important thing is what processes and systems are in place to deal with it quickly and efficiently when it does.
swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Solid.
Lots of thought clearly already gone into it and I hope you do well.
I like my home here, nsfw and all, but I’ll still likely end up making an alt over on feddit.uk as per the invite way up there. Linked by bio both ways as per your rules ofc.
That’s it, there’s no more question marks and you can have your peace now 😅