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Somewhat relevant, I believe mastodon's argument for not supporting age verification is that they don't collect location data and so there's no way for them to determine if their users are somewhere where age verification applies. I don't know how well that works on legal grounds, but probably worth thinking about if you're building social apps that require geolocation
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Re: I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server for the #Fediverse.
@tom@tomkahe.com said in I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server for the #Fediverse.:
Somewhat relevant, I believe mastodon's argument for not supporting age verification is that they don't collect location data and so there's no way for them to determine if their users are somewhere where age verification applies. I don't know how well that works on legal grounds, but probably worth thinking about if you're building social apps that require geolocation
Yeah, this justification just doesn't pass scrutiny. Mastodon does collect the user's recently active IP addresses, and from that you can use geoip to resolve to a country/state. This could also all be handled by a FASP.
In other words, Mastodon could indeed implement age verification, the only remaining question is: what would that gate access to?
Interesting point. Age verification laws around the world are going to make everything a lot more tricky.
Though Mastodon's argument doesn't make sense to me: IP addresses inherently map to location data, so we all receive *some* location, whether we're listening or now.
I don't have a good solution for this, right now.
It'll probably need to be baked into new user registrations, which admins would need to choose in some way.
Do you have a solution you'd recommend?
@benpate
no idea, I imagine a lot of my answers involve fixing the laws themselves haha.
Bluesky offloads some of that responsibility to the PDS (i.e. I can tell my PDS that I'm an adult and it'll tell Bluesky that I'm verified) so (very) long-term I think I'd like that sort of service provided by the C2S server, so clients wouldn't have to think about it.
But yeah, I'd assume you'd have to implement it during the registration process and have admins use a method of their choice for verifying age (and optionally let them turn it off entirely if they can confidently say that nobody from XYZ location will ever be using the site)
@benpate
no idea, I imagine a lot of my answers involve fixing the laws themselves haha.
Bluesky offloads some of that responsibility to the PDS (i.e. I can tell my PDS that I'm an adult and it'll tell Bluesky that I'm verified) so (very) long-term I think I'd like that sort of service provided by the C2S server, so clients wouldn't have to think about it.
But yeah, I'd assume you'd have to implement it during the registration process and have admins use a method of their choice for verifying age (and optionally let them turn it off entirely if they can confidently say that nobody from XYZ location will ever be using the site)
Yes. Great point. And UX and privacy are both top concernse of mine.
So, #Emissary's default registration options ask for very little information: name you want to use, public-facing username, and an email address where you can receive notifications.
This should be enough to provide anonymity for those who require it, while still allowing them to build trust and reputation with their community via this new identity.
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