Are services like Lemmy, Mastodon or PeerTube KYC’d in the UK?
Sorry to be a doomer, but if so, then the Fediverse has failed and we should just move on with a decentralized web that uses decentralized backends: Nostr, Odysee/LBRY, etc.
Maybe the threat model of the Fediverse was incomplete. It isn’t just Big Tech who is threat, but also regulation by Big Government.
KYC = know your customer
For everyone else but knowing
Nope the sentence still doesn’t make sense.
Is this about the government requiring ID in order to view pornography because, a, it only applies to pornography websites which Lemmy isn’t, and b, doesn’t work anyway.
ysk, it’s not just pornography, it’s vague and targets “legal content harmful to children”. It’s up to content provider or facilitator to decide how broad it’ll be and for the UK courts to test the scope.
My understanding is that a handful of instances on the fediverse have geo-IP blocked the UK rather than open themselves to legal trouble.
I would guess that the others are either operated outside of anywhere that the UK can enforce its rules, not beholden to the new rules (I believe I read that there is a minimum user count for them to actually apply), or are just winging it.
I’d be shocked if more than maybe 4 instances of systems on the fediverse even had the resources to try to comply with this.
Afaik it’s just .zip because the admin decided to have a meltdown instead of read the legislation, nothing else seems to have been affected.
Big Tech IS big government. It’s the same, the difference is just that one has a profit model and that another in some countries can be elected.
And in some, both are the same.
The nice thing about the fediverse being open source is that if an instance or the developers required this the solution work be to fork. I predict an new migration to lemmy if reddit starts requiring ID.
I predict an new migration to lemmy if reddit starts requiring ID.
We are ready for a new wave!
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There are already instances hosted in countries that don’t play ball with the UK
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I suppose everyone would hear to tor or another anonymous network then.
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The Fediverse is decentralized, a law cannot affect all of Mastodon, Lemmy, or Peertube.
There are hundreds of servers in different parts of the world. Choose one you like.
Fediverse is very good at censorship resistance, much better than alternatives.
If internet is restricted in your country, use a VPN. If you’re an admin, move your server to a different country.If internet is not restricted, then there is nothing to worry about.
If you need a VPN to access it, then the Fediverse isn’t censorship-resistant. The VPN is. Even more, the Fediverse instance is geoblocking/censoring you.
Examples of services that geoblock you or KYC you:
- YouTube
- Fediverse instances
Examples of services that don’t geoblock/KYC you:
- Tor
- Nostr
- IPFS
- I2P
- VPNs
Fediverse is tens of thousands of instances. You may need a VPN to access your home instance (e.g. if it is blocked in your country), the rest of the network can be accessed from there.
I never heard about instances doing KYC (which is usually done by payments processors). If your home instance requires KYC, you can always move to another instance that doesn’t require it, because there are so many of them all across the world.VPNs are not much different from the Fediverse, by the way. It’s just servers, they can be blocked by ISPs, and they can geoblock users. This is also true for Nostr relays, IPFS gateways, Tor relays, etc.
Uk here.
Mastodon and Pixelfed are working fine.
@gasull@lemmy.ml what the heck are you talking about?
Mastodon can not “KYC” UK users because there is no central Mastodon. Even if an instance like mastodon.social gets bad ideas you can install your own Mastodon instance since node to node communication is - ignoring moderation - unrestricted.
Mastodon/Lemmy instances can be forced to KYC you. So you would have to jump into hoops and move from instance to instance. It will be like torrent sites or darknet markets, that come and go.
Yes, you can self-host, and should, but most people don’t want to be a sysadmin, and it isn’t easy. Ideally you should be able to participate in a self-sovereign way without being a sysadmin. Just like:
- you can torrent something without being a sysadmin
- you can self-custody your cryptocurrency without being a sysadmin
- you can chat on SimpleX or Session and never be deplatformed without being a sysadmin
- you can use Nostr and never be deplatformed without being a sysadmin
There used to be p2p clients like napster. This can always come back
going after small internet sites would mean we have slipped deep into authoritarian rule
