I’m still totally stuck on how you’d stop a 14 year old from installing an off-the-shelf Lemmy container into his/her homelab and started using it.

Things rarely proceed to the extremes as they get harder and more pushback the further you go. But the logical extension of wanting access to all public communications and verification of everyone’s online identity is that access to general computation has to be outlawed. Access to a programmable general purpose computer trivially defeats any restrictions you place on commercial services.

We do need to think about how for profit companies forgo their social responsibility and mess with people’s heads in pursuit of profits and if that should be regulated and how. But there are clearly some creepy people online, who might be funded, but aren’t necessarily motivated solely by profit but by ideology who will find ways to target people whatever the government does. Kids need to be prepared to live in that world and be very skeptical and it just isn’t happening. Today’s kids are just as fucking stupid as we were and they can’t afford to be.

The government have leapt straight to regulation, in my opinion likely pushed by some players in the tech industry and possibly five eyes without fully educating themselves. Potentially they are going to do more harm than good. I suspect a lot of kids are going to drift to less regulated and more extreme alternatives and we save a few kids from Tik Tok memes at the expense of more neo-nazi Christchurch shooters.