set it to sorting by “new comments”, it’s what I did to make sure I see somewhat different things most of the time I refresh it

There are many more examples of this here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html

The problem is that “human freedom” and “human rights” are very general and somewhat vague terms and some people’s freedoms and rights are sometimes in conflict with each other. So it’s also often meaningless to say that you support “human freedom” and “human rights” without asking what freedoms and rights and for whom.

FOSS is a very specific subset of human freedom and human rights, it’s the right to control, modify and distribute the software one uses. All other parts of human freedom and human rights aren’t something that the free software movement necessarily has a position on. (Free software can certainly be used to, at least arguably, violate human rights, for example armed forces can use free software too, and should be able to!)

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.

u wot m8

The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D

I think it must have been Etch, though I had to look at a versions table to figure that out.

It’s funny because Debian was the first Linux distro I ever installed and used.

Very shortly after my 14th birthday.

So you’re agreeing with me that this was supported by both parties…?

(I’m actually Austrian, not German; I have however read enough about US politics that I’m fairly confident in my statement above.)

Garuda Linux will not implement any age verification measures, since Garuda Linux’s legal jurisdictions have no laws mandating age verification.

Yes. That’s how it should be, that on the Internet you only have to comply with laws where you or the servers you are hosting things on are based, and all other places can piss off when it comes to enforcing their laws.

And it’s how it mostly used to work, but we now live in this world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov

One of my childhood dreams was to run my own successful web forum. Now that we live in this world where that means countries might prosecute me because my users have been doing things that are illegal somewhere in the world, that dream is officially dead. >:(

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

That’s a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?

I thought I’d read somewhere that in Germany, the regional governments do most of the heavy lifting in terms of legislation, with a very limited federal government

The federal government in Germany certainly has more legislative power (in comparison to state governments) than that of the US.

The thing about Germany is that in Germany, there are many areas where federal laws are enforced by state executive branches, which isn’t really a thing in the US.

Isn’t this just a slight variation on the Simpsons joke “alcohol-free beer $5”? 😁🍺

It’s probably going to be even harder to prevent here because due to federation it’s very easy to open multiple accounts across instances and no instance admin has full user data of accounts on other instances…

But it also provides the opportunity to move to instances (and their communities) where the problem is well-managed, if any exist.

wait wait wait reddit is against AI bots? news to me… https://documentingourdecline.substack.com/p/ai-bots-appeared-after-reddit-partnered

(Why exactly would anyone believe that face ID verification can stop AI bots? Have they seen how well generative AI can generate videos of humans?)

Yes, you did: OpenID.

I remember when I first read about it (late 2000s? not sure when), I thought it was an awesome idea and surely the web of the future would be full of “log in with OpenID” buttons.

Instead it is now full of “log in with Google”, “log in with Facebook”, “log in with Microsoft” buttons.

We could also use the term “age declaration”.

It’s not by itself an outrageous feature (what does that even mean, outrageous feature). What is outrageous is that governments around the world are starting to think they have the authority to compel this.

I doubt that because for example the Wikimedia wikis have been very successfully blocking Tor exit nodes from editing their wikis for a very long time; if they can do that, anyone can.

The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.