Headlines like this really need to put the emphasis on the cause, e.g. "UK Government Forces Bluesky to Roll Out Age Verification"

If they did this here, I'd just stop using bluesky. I'm 41. But I have no interest in verifying ages online. We've all seen how poorly companies handle intetnal security.

Just yesterday McDonalds had their entire database of applications compromised because someone tried the password 123456.

Bluesky would be dropped instantly.

Canadian Senate Bill S-209 aims to do the same in Canada. These idiots really want our data so bad.

This isn't about age verification. It's about getting your ID and tying your (probably illegal but yet to be proven) online activity to it. Much like the firewall of China.

All wrapped up nicely in the disguise of "age verification"

If it works the way they claim it is indeed very private.

I haven't even verified my email with Blue. This would be more than a deal breaker.

"why has our userbase in the uk cratered but our userbase in germany skyrocketed?" - some bluesky dev looking at google analytics

Same in Australia. From memory the law has already passed, it’s just got a delay on it to give companies a chance to implement it.

Where’s that federation?

And how would this fit in? Are they just going to build a bunch of excuses into the platform, and then claim it’s now impossible?

It doesn't.

Pretty concerning that a "western democracy" is doing this, because it gives cover for the next one and the next one.

It's easy to say "oh I'll just stop using such and such a service" but what happens when there are no more legal services to switch to?

According to whom?

This pisses me off, governments mandating control. Would this affect Lemmy or any fediverse software one day?

I'm looking forward to having a good excuse to delete most of my accounts and move entirely to decentralised platforms.

Not feasibly, no. If a centralized platform like bluesky refuses to abide by the laws in a given country, their platform can be made inaccessible in that country. Trying to do that to countless activitypub-compliant servers wouldn't be practical since you van just hop to another server.

Thanks for the information.

I found this specific clause very ... porous.

Clarification — commercial purpose
6 For greater certainty, for the purpose of section 5, an organization that incidentally and not deliberately provides a service that is used to search for, transmit, download, store or access content on the Internet that is alleged to constitute pornographic material does not make available pornographic material on the Internet for commercial purposes.

So... I guess Bing will once again be my goto incidental indeliberate porn search engine. And reddit. And Lemmy.

Public Bill (Senate) S-209 (45-1) - First Reading - Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act - Parliament of Canada

Public Bill (Senate) S-209 (45-1) - First Reading - Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act - Parliament of Canada

(www.parl.ca)

Surprisingly, a conservative senator had a fairly well reasoned, and cautious, (although still supportive), response speech.

Debates, Issue 8 (June 10, 2025)

Debates, Issue 8 (June 10, 2025)

SenCanada (sencanada.ca)

It still has a long way to goto get through senate committee and house readings and committees and all that. Still, might be a good time to scrape all the porn.

This is the UK we're talking about, absolutely no one in government knows how to block anything. Seriously every time they block something I just use one of those crappy free VPN plugins and get around it. Basically I'm only looking for magnet links anyway.

You don't even need to keep the VPN on to torrent the file. It's so stupid.

Just hope they (Facebook and friends) give you the choice to delete OR verify those accounts and not require verification to delete it.

I have seen some people in UK (on reddit) complaining about ISP sending notices when torrenting w/o a VPN.