Simon Harris says Ireland to lead EU drive for ID-verified social media
https://extra.ie/2025/12/28/news/simon-harris-social-media-regulations
Supposing this happens in the near future, what would it mean in practice for the #Fediverse?
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Ireland to lead EU drive for ID-verified social media
Nice, home to most usa big tech and has voted in an industry influencer as data not protected officer.
Fsck OFF you disgusting paddy twits.
It allows govt to track non conforming accts, trouble is its the easy way for him to try to reduce the damage to society the techbros do with their control of social media. But it would be easier to make them accountable but his country is home to all of them because & they own him.
@everton137 I think this might make fediverse illegal.
That’s probably the point.
Make legislation hard enough to comply with, so only the giants can afford it.
@everton137 100% not going to happen. This will be like Denmark and ChatControl. Harris's party has a lunatic peddling the idea of using a Facebook ID. This just might be an attempt to mitigate effects of coming collision between US and EU on tech regulation which may hit Ireland hard. It will be completely unacceptable to other states as well as unpopular in Ireland.
Politicians say foolish things every day.
@everton137 not sure. But likely any definition of platforms that would be expected to comply will be based on the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA already applies minimally to fediverse, and not at all if not a public instance imo. The answer in short lies in deeper federation, I suspect. IANAL obviously.
@ton
I'm just gonna leave this here: https://cdn.ceps.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025-02_DSA_Fediverse-Explainer_FINAL-1.pdf
Make what you wish of it, but at least they (EU) have thought about Fediverse.
And they seem to identify it as a problem.
@everton137
@shadowdancer @everton137 thanks for the pointer, I read that at the time. One of the reasons I think federating _more_ is a path, bc of that report. Also on one point I think CEPS report contains a misinterpretation bc of not following all references in the definitions to their deepest source (wrt the role of donations as revenue). I probably should write more about it, as an explanatory blogpost, beyond 255 chars ;)
These people prove to be enemies of democracy and citizens' rights.
> Supposing this happens in the near future, what would it mean in practice for the #Fediverse?
Wide-scale non-adherence, and probably little regulatory attention / risk outside massive instances.
@neil @everton137 If the bigger servers get problems, there's always the possibility to turn to smaller ones instead. At one point, I had my own server running just for my account. If this ever happens in the future, I'd provide a server again.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@dr_laemmerbein/115802219390053477
Can we scale up if we need to create a whole Fediverse made up of smaller instances?
> there's always the possibility to turn to smaller ones instead
Yes, absolutely.
I am on my own instance, fwiw :)
The more instances, the greater the signalling overhead.
Would this be feasible for millions of users in practice?
I am aware a few people could run their own instances. The Fediverse todays has its majority of users on mastodon.social.
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