Lemmy.zip is UK based and ended up blocking anyone from the UK from visiting the site π€·
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
129 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
43347 readers
667 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I can only answer for dbzer0/anarchist.nexus but FUCK NO. We ain't gonna do that shit lol. If we ever have trouble with the law in any country, we can always backup and move.
Ditto. We were contemplating a flash screen warning with links to VPNs and TOR for affected countries.
That's how you troll them lol
That isnβt a legal way around the age verification laws.
I was wondering if I chose the right instance migrating over from lemm.ee. Nice to see I did
β€
ππ
Compliance depends on the instance. Pick an instance where the admin doesnβt give a dingoβs kidney, or an instance located in a country where the local law doesnβt require age verification.
Hmm, do we know which countries will be exempt? I hadn't thought about that...
Also, how will they enforce who can just ignore the requirement? Will they not take noncompliant websites down by nameservers or something?
Iβve only heard about UK, Australia and certain states in America. If you live in Kazakhstan next to Borat, you should be fine.
As always, EU is complicated, so weβll have to wait and see how that works out.
Twitter / X started asking for age verification for adult content when browsed from EU. Works fine from Asia but you also need to set your account country to the one you're browsing from.
So, if you canβt even use Xitter for porn is there anything left? What even is the propose of that site any more?
It's still the biggest art posting platform. And I'm not even sure where art posters should migrate to... I mean sure it would be nice to have them scattered across different fediverse instances, but it would be nice for us, not for them. The main thing they get from X is massive algorithmic reach. You hit like on a Miku art and another artist with their Miku art immediately slips into your feed, you like it even more and you decide to check their profile and you like their other works and you subscribe. This kind of easy and efficient advertisement is something that doesn't exist anywhere else outside of few centralized systems.
There's always the classics. Diviant art, new grounds, ink bunny, pixv, Tumblr, and fur affinity.
If you ever want to share art just look to were the furries flea too. You won't ever find a group more determined to share their art then them.
Why donβt art posters use yβknow something dedicated to art or images and not microblogging?
Like DeviantArt or Tumblr, the two once popular with artists sites designed for them.
Pixiv, Fanbox, DeviantArt, Tumblr, etc, are also widely used. Very few people only use a single platform. I think Twitter is top 1 for expanding your audience not only because how well their feed algorithm works, but maybe also because all those focused platforms are used more by artists and less by viewers (or used less often by viewers), while Twitter being general-purpose is the one where more people who like to watch/discover arts but are not artists themselves, are. But there are other factors, like Twitter comments being better than Pixiv or DeviantArt comments, etc. Finally, if we return to the context of this discussion, I don't think any of those dedicated platforms in any way solve the problem of age verification and that is why I wouldn't recommend migrating to them in this context even if they were otherwise good for art.
I donβt understand why anyone would ever use Twitter for porn in the first place lol. Porn sites existβ¦β¦
Iβve been on Twitter for like 16 years now and porn has never been something Iβve seen or even thought to search for on there. It makes no sense.
load more comments
(1 replies)
There isn't a global law about age verification they countries could be exempt of. It's individual countries doing it.
And on top of that the laws are different from what I've seen, in the UK for example you have to fullfil certain criteria to fall under that law. But frankly it seems to be a mess in my opinion.
This is what an age verification service says about it:
https://www.yoti.com/blog/understanding-age-verification-online-safety-act/
Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?
If they're located in the UK, sure. But given how small Lemmy instances are, I assume they'll fly under the radar.
Non-UK instances won't be forced to do anything. The UK can't do shit outside their borders, so as long as the instance's operator doesn't set foot into the country, all they can do is block the instance in the UK.
Was wondering about this, I'm in UK, I could just make my own instance, I'm the only user so I verify my own age, federate with everyone. All good? Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
I love that idea.
If you do, I'd like to know what kind of bandwidth and system usage it demands.
I've been wondering if a pi could do this for me and my few friends.
Until similar laws hit other countries
Well they can do shit - they can put out arrest warrants and fines, and possibly have the person extradited to the UK depending on the country.
Right, but realistically this would be far too much work. Like, they would need to do the same for every digital sex worker who has ever spun up their own website. It's just not feasible.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I really don't see that happening. The internet and the real people that build it tend to be innovative tinkerers and hackers. Things get built because there's a need and someone tries to say they can't. P2P, darknets, proxies, VPNs, heck the whole concept of the fediverse defies the idea of control by an external entity. So they may try, but the chances are slim it works.
At the end of the day, if two computers can talk to each other there will always be some form of uncontrollable internet.
In the UK the law is largely unenforceable. VPN usage has shot up since it came in and there was a reveal the houses of parliament are exempt from the requirement.
The internet safety law is impacting larger companies that profit from adult content such as red GIFs and pornhub.
Facebook hasn't been called out yet despite the very obvious adult content in their reels.
Smaller sites are flying under the radar for now. Lemmy probably due to it's distributed nature.
the houses of parliament are exempt from the requirement.
Of course, the jerks...
I've always said the only way to make this fair is for the big sites to publish viewing data
My instance just blocked UK users. Je suis francais maintenant, mate.
Mastodon has nothing they can do to implement digital ID's, which is what age verification is. Lemmy might not have the technology to do it, because it's libre and a protocol.
No, just like they don't give a fuck about your privacy either. If any instance does get big enough then yeah it's fucked.
From my end as a tiny instance with virtually no users I'm watching how enforcement goes on small systems like these.
If they start sending warnings I'll just make browsing content required an account and close sign ups.
I've already gone through and ensured none of the communities carried has the NSFW tag. But that's not really much in terms of protection.
If they start getting around to us I think it'll mean fediverse users in the UK will either need to run their own instance or use a vpn. No way hobbyists can contract age verification.
I've been wondering what this would mean for my instance at !dullsters@dullsters.net signups are closed, but users from other instances can post.
I think this is a real problem for the fediverse. Because I cannot imagine that ofcom will accept that "the home instanx should have moderated that" will be a defence. And here (and mayve for you) only I am moderating the content on my own instance. It's not possible to moderate all the remote communities I carry.
Like I say. Once I see action (it will start with warnings) against smaller instances I'll just lock things down to myself and existing users. But it will destroy the threadiverse in the UK.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I don't think I'll block any, but then I only have a few friends using my instance.
I'm in the odd boat that my server in in Australia (for the AU laws), but I call it a NZ instance - where I live
view more: next βΊ