I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
Maybe the whole age verification thing is keeping people offline.
Missing the Internet of my youth makes me feel older than almost anything else.
Fewer things are sadder than the reality of the Internet compared to what we envisioned early on.
It’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of my lifetime, I’m truly not exaggerating. We went from the free sharing of the majority of human knowledge to forcing people to sell their souls for YouTube money.
I feel the same way. I was a CS major in the early 80s. I watched the internet become something amazing, and then I watched it rot. Heartbreaking.
I’m not in a country with the age verification thing, but has it been turned on for Lemmy servers?
UK user here, several big lemmy instances are unavailable for me apart from when I’m on erm holiday
I don’t know, but I was thinking it might be causing people to be less online generally, even if Lemmy itself isn’t a problem. I wonder what the Lemmy NSFW people are doing.
I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.
no
That’s just UK currently
Right, but I’m assuming there’s a nontrivial number of UK users.
Well there’s an amount, but it wouldn’t have much impact on the Fediverse as there’s no age-ID here.
Therefore to comply, the server would relocate or go offline.
Lemmy.zip is the only notable instance to have done this. Mostly because the owner is based in the UK.