Post #1548779

2026-04-19 11:15 UTC

@interru Sorry about the late response, had a busy day yesterday and wanted to give this reply some proper thought. I think we're both mostly in agreement here. I also object to mandating verification, to social media bans, etc etc, it's why I keep stressing how I only think this system is a good idea as an option for platform owners to elect to make use of. But you're arguing against it based on what it *might* enable (that we can and should fight against) while not considering what it actually does. It's like that systemd patch that added a date of birth field. The patch didn't mandate any sort of age verification, it didn't even add any mandatory data sharing, it just implemented something that others might need in a place that made sense. Yet a mob made the dev's life miserable because they saw "might be used for mandatory age verification" and stopped thinking beyond that. Gonna need some more space for the parenting bit so 🧵

Replies (1)

@Karcsesz@equestria.social 2026-04-19 11:44

@interru Parenting is hard, I hope we can agree on this. My parents were on top of their game for the most part, but they still couldn't 100% deal with everything. They taught me and my brother about these potential harms, they did everything in their power to keep us safe while not being helicopters. We still ended up in places where we weren't welcome. And would you rather have to make every place child friendly, or give owners tools to say "sorry, no kids allowed here". Because who should take the blame if a kid gets into a situation where they get hurt? The kid who didn't know better? The parent who tried their best? Or the members of the place who thought they were dealing with an adult? A monotonically increasing numeric value doesn't quite map to what we might call maturity, but that just means we need a better signal for maturity. And once we have that, this same system can be updated alongside to let others safely query that signal.

Open ##1548780