Age verification becomes more common. Australia, France, etc. introduce such laws to ban children below 15 years from social media platforms, to protect them.
Will these laws also be relevant to fediverse/lemmy specifically?
Personally I think these laws will focus on the big platforms at first (facebook/meta, youtube, discord, instagramm), which will force younger users with technical skills onto smaller and niche sites. Over time focus on this question will increase for the fediverse.
It might happen for some instances, but I think if some countries start requiring fediverse instances to do this, most users will switch to instances hosted in countries that don’t require it.
I’m based in the UK. But my instance only actually has single digits of actual active users. So, it’s not bothering me too much.
The moment I get a letter from OFCOM, or I see they’re enforcing against smaller federated sites, I’ll just remove non login readable capability and make it entirely invite only (which won’t be a problem, the only people joining for ages were bots and when I added the AI blocking/cloudflare protection they’ve stopped coming too). Until then I am assuming they’re going after the actual social media companies.
Will this switching become an illegal act?
I don’t think so. That would be a hard thing to enforce and rather pointless. Comparing it to other internet regulations like the GDPR, it’s not illegal to use a website that doesn’t adhere to it. That said, with the amount of stupidity we tend to see in politics, who knows what some countries might do.
What may happen is that the websites get blocked by the ISP at request.
Lemmy does manage to circumvent this by the fact every instance has its own domain and cached content.
Most likely, 4chan.org will be blocked and a British Firewall will be added.