At the exact moment when Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are actively dismantling democratic institutions and working to silence critics, a group of Democratic Senators have decided to collaborate…
Companies are the real constituents, unfortunately.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think this could kill the US side of the fediverse by saddling small, independent operators with legal burden, forcing them to shut down rather than spend thousands on legal fees or fines. Like the UK’s Online Safety Act, something disguised as “Save The Children!” will only serve to entrench large oligopolies at the expense of everyone else.
Actually, I think it should be possible to protect the fediverse: Each instance must simply not qualify as a social network. For example, the EU has many regulations which only apply for commercial providers with some minimum revenue or user count.
As I understand it, none of these actually apply to small self-hosted servers (e.g. a by a local hackerspace or small friend group) even if they allow for federation.
To make this really viable, the Fediverse apps need to become better at discovery among many small instances. Currently, my self-hosted instance barely shows me any posts because it only gets updates for the communities I (or a user of my instance) explicitly subscribed to. This splits up the already small userbase so much that I instead use tchncs.de, one of the larger instances in Germany, where many communities are already subscribed by other users.
Companies are the real constituents, unfortunately.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think this could kill the US side of the fediverse by saddling small, independent operators with legal burden, forcing them to shut down rather than spend thousands on legal fees or fines. Like the UK’s Online Safety Act, something disguised as “Save The Children!” will only serve to entrench large oligopolies at the expense of everyone else.
Actually, I think it should be possible to protect the fediverse: Each instance must simply not qualify as a social network. For example, the EU has many regulations which only apply for commercial providers with some minimum revenue or user count. As I understand it, none of these actually apply to small self-hosted servers (e.g. a by a local hackerspace or small friend group) even if they allow for federation.
To make this really viable, the Fediverse apps need to become better at discovery among many small instances. Currently, my self-hosted instance barely shows me any posts because it only gets updates for the communities I (or a user of my instance) explicitly subscribed to. This splits up the already small userbase so much that I instead use tchncs.de, one of the larger instances in Germany, where many communities are already subscribed by other users.