I welcome the new EU rules for the protection of minors on social media.
I think the fediverse has a major benefit here, in that we can create local communities where admins and users have faces, and access is democratically guaranteed.
For example, if I make a local instance, it is *good* to know who is using my instance. I can create a space where new members who want to sign up first talk to me personally, and if required sign a document to prove they are of age.
Europe has the structures for this in associations, cooperatives, etc.
Maybe “sign up now” should be “sign up when we meet next week and we’ll show you what’s possible in person”.
We need to take a step back and ask ourselves: where do our preconceived notions of “age verification” come from?
Right now, it’s from big monolithic platforms that promise the world and then take everything.
A major hurdle for the Fediverse will be to create spaces separate from “the big wide world”, where children can interact with other children and are protected from traumatic content and abuse.
This is not currently in focus, and that’s a shame.
There are huge possibilities, in what children could do with a platform where they can meet children from other countries in a safe environment, and form friendships online over their hobbies.
There could be automatic translation done in an educational way, where the child can get into contact with other languages and learn to be a proper European citizen during their formative years.
Schools could use this to connect classes with others from different backgrounds and countries.
Technically, I think we have a strong need for closed groups (i.e. not visible to the open internet) that are still federating between consenting instances, which in turn need strict data retention policies.
Not just the right to forget, but the obligation to forget.
Meanwhile, if a child has a conversation with another child, it might want to keep a memory somehow even though its online data is deleted pretty soon after.