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.
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.