There was a site I found in highschool around 1998 - the paradigm of pessimism.

Full of dark humor and anti-jokes, in glorious web 1.0 - that site had a huge impact on my humor. I've never been able to find it again. Just a random site someone hosted somewhere on the Internet - no scams, no paywalls, just a bunch of weird humor.

It took like 2 minutes to download a single photo though.

To be fair, this already applies to any baseband blob.

Yeah, we're all mad, fuck the suits and all that.

But why does the distinction between "real-world adult material" and "creative, non-realistic", "artistic, animated works" that "do no harm" matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.

Are they in favour of age verification for "uncreative, realistic" pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?

I tried gemini protocol for a bit to see if it did a decent job addressing this, but it doesn't.
We do legit need a 'smallweb' non-commercial sort of thing, but I suspect retreating to a BBS model is probably what is required.

My networking knowledge may be out of date, but can't you get around region locked sites with VPNs or Tor?

I was in Turkey in July 2019. Wikipedia was blocked. I had to use Tor to access it. On installation I think I had to tick a special box that said something like "use flux capacitor bridge for blablabla countries like China and Turkey"

Though In that case, Wikipedia didn't give a fuck if you were accessing it from Tor. The government did.

I know some sites block tor/VPN access for various reasons

This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.

You can

But most people will not go to those lengths, esp not kids.

Illusion of choice.

There's a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There's no guarantee it'll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.

I'd take that over the bullshit attacks the internet of today is attracting.

Me too, so much!

A big reason why I've come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It's not super crowded, it's an app that isn't design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.

I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.

I interpreted it as "can't possibly be doing harm to the people in the video" - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction

The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.

At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we might just need a "2nd internet"

Doesn't proton offer a free vpn with limits?

Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn't say that it's kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.

Depends on what you mean by "kids". Elementary schoolers, no, but some teens are willing to do a surprising amount of work to accomplish something if it's important enough to them. And then they pass their method along to their friends, or offer to set up anyone in the school for the price of a couple of bags of snack food.

"snack food"

Nowadays, if there's something you like online, remember to plug it into archive.org so it gets added to the wayback machine. You'll still need to remember the URL to access it, but at least it will be archived somewhere