I’m kind of out of the loop but I saw for example Bluesky was blocking Mississippi residents from accessing Bluesky: bsky.social/…/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Anyone know what the plan is for lemmy instances and other forums?
A friend of a friend is an an admin in some federated platform and I asked them about this.
What they said is that the amount of bullshit around age verification is so significant that they would be willing to fight this legally, spend all money they have, and go to prison before caving in. Realistically, they think that at most their service would be brought down by the hosting infrastructure provider, which would motivate them to put effort into other types of solution.
But they consider it idiotic to say such a thing publicly, because regulators do have power and they could be looking for someone to make an example out of. Better to keep quiet, ignore it, and see how things develop instead of loudly making a fuzz. They think that there is a good chance that nothing meaningful comes out of this, as there have been many other scares in the past that fizzled out.
Lovstuhagen@hilariouschaos.com 1 day ago
It may be the case that they would have to deal with this sort of thing on an instance by intance basis, right, and a lot of these instances are too small to warrant state level attention, so it might not be a big deal.
airrow@hilariouschaos.com 22 hours ago
I think that could work initially but I don’t know how sustainable that approach is
I’m thinking maybe in practice they will end up dialing the scope of this back some to make it more workable