Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that’s gonna be rough for users. I don’t envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.