Many of us dislike all the things you listed for their impact, including AI.

I think most people would argue 1-3% of datacenter use is still a significant global pollution factor that is a problem.

Does PeerTube have a better discovery algorithm than Mastodon? I have found simply tags and newest doesn’t work for me.

Does anybody know a Youtube that has videos about tech tinkering, crafting, and making art? I’ve tested out Odysee once, but at the time it was full of right-wing xenophobic stuff, which seemed to keep the creative crowd away. Also, Odysee was unusable from a slow mobile connection since it often didn’t offer a lower bitrate stream…

This is why lemmy is great. At least for now, most instances aren’t run for-profit and it shows.

Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn’t send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they’re not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.

It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/17/hundreds-of-websites-to-shut-down-under-chilling-internet/ Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up…

This article is interesting as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just-banning-minors-social-media-not-protecting-them My favorite quote is this one, “All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. […] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation.”

Since many parents don’t seem to be aware this mode exists, I think it’s a good idea to ask that prominently by default. Technically versed parents like you can still use other approaches.

Here is the source that they want to make e.g. Youtube, Netflix, … rely on this new app: https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

This is definitely going to be copy&pasted as a foundation in many EU states. Therefore, that it requires Android and iOS at all, let alone Google Play, is a fundamental error. Some people avoid smartphones for good reasons, yet still access parts of the internet that may apparently soon be gatekept by this new age verification mechanism. Also see here.

The main problem isn’t the Google Play integration, but that this requires an Android or iOS device at all. This should be based on something like flutter or electron, and be easily portable with an agnostic build script for e.g. Linux, UBports, postmarketOS, and so on, as well. If only for the reason that most Android and iOS devices will effectively become unpatchable after the mandatory 5-ish years run out, while a standardized UEFI desktop platform will not. There are so many reasons not to have a “standard” smartphone nowadays. Also see here.

And if you accept terms of use: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/15

Apparently they want everybody to get some sort of “EU wallet”, that is, some digital signed identity which sounds super dystopian. But that’s just what I read. It sounds like a complete disaster.

I feel like a productive way to address this would be to make a child mode mandatory for all operating systems, as some EU countries already did, and then to give parents a better incentive to actually enable it. For example, all end-user devices could be pressured into prominently showing an option to enable it when first booted up (without forcing your hand either way) so that it’s hard to miss. There are so many other ways to improve this situation.

I didn’t find the exact same article, but this one makes pretty much the same claim: https://facia.ai/news/video-platforms-must-enforce-age-checks-or-face-massive-eu-fines/

A rolling back mechanism is the best thing to have for server tweaks. I achieve the same with docker. Something similar might be possible with FreeBSD Jails, podman, or anything similar like that. (Not that NixOS is a bad choice, I just wanted to share some more options for anybody looking for some to try.)

Right, but the article does. Anyway, I’m moving on. Thanks for the discussion.

But the article later does back it up: “Although Cloudflare singled out Google, other search engines that view AI search features as part of their search products also use the same bots for training as they do for search indexing.”

In any case, I’m okay with admitting neither you nor me can look inside Google to see they’re doing. But the claims are out there, I didn’t make them up, whether they’re true or not. Thank you for the certainly interesting Google crawler info link.

You look up what Googlebot does. No AI.

The page seems written to perhaps suggest it but doesn’t explicitly say the other bots can’t feed into some other sort of AI training. It would be in Google’s interest to mislead the users here.

Edit: I found a quote where it says Googlebot does both in one: “Google-Extended doesn’t have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent […]” and I guess Cloudflare doesn’t trust Google to abide by the access controls. That seems sensible to me. Edit 2: What exactly the CEO believes was perhaps rightfully disputed below, it was just my guess.

Nothing on this page seems to contradict the article. But if I simply missed the part that does, I’d be happy to learn.

So what’s the quote from the documentation that backs up your claim? The line “perform other product specific crawls” seems extremely vague by design.

And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/