I could spend an hour writing a long winded explanation of why capitalists “earn” their wealth through wage theft… but Comrade Hakim already made a video that explains this concept pretty well so here.

Yup… right what I suspected! The Slippery Slope Fallacy!

Whats gonna happens when politicians realize kids are just gonna click “I’m at least [Age]”?

Many pornography work like that and can, as such, be easily bypassed. But does that mean we should drop the age restriction for access to pornography? Of course not!

Here is another example:

Murder. Murder shouldn’t be legal and it is not. However, despite this restriction, some find ways to get away with murder. Does that mean that laws against murder are useless since we cannot stop murder 100% of the time? I highly doubt it.

It is impossible for any law enforcement to prevent 100% of all crimes, but that is not justification for those law to not exist.

Either you have a toothless law, or you live in a country with Great Firewall of China.

False dilemma fallacy.

Again, I’ll refer to pornography. Many pornography work on the trust system. By your logic, that means we should drop all laws restricting access to it. However, that is absurd.

The point isn’t to stop 100% of all usage. It is simply there to reduce the usage. You are forgetting that we are talking about human beings. Beings which have a natural tendency to conform to social norms as to not be cast out of their tribe (since humans cannot survive in the wild without each other, such would be a death sentence).

This law would set the societal precedent that people need to be of a certain age to access these social media apps (as shown by scientific data, which revealed that social media usage can have many negative effects on a developing mind). This societal precedent will, hopefully, make it taboo for people bellow 16 to access social media, which will, in turn, reduce, but not outright 100% stop, underage social media usage.

???

How is restricting access behind an age requirement the same as the “Great Firewall”. Right now, as we speak, you cannot use social media until you are 13. They are just increasing that requirement to 16.

There are many many many other things that are already lock behind an age restriction and I don’t see you freaking out. Here are a few examples of things locked behind an age restriction:

• alcohol

• gambling

• cigarettes

• pornography

Media has age restrictions. Books have age restrictions, movies have age restrictions, games have age restrictions. Media has had age restrictions for a very long time and it’s high time the same standards are applied to social media.

Just because it isn’t perfect it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn’t mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.

There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren’t too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.

And before you say “Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it.” Never underestimate tech illiteracy.

I’ve thought for a long time the first thing that someone should read when they try to join Mastodon is “This isn’t like any social media you’ve ever joined. We do things different, and if you read along, you’ll understand why.”

I agree. Usually we present Mastodon and other federated platforms as alternatives to other centralized ones and that makes them expect the exact same experience, since, after all, we told them it was just like the other one.

We need to set the expectation that these federated platforms work in a different manner and as such you need to learn a few things before using it.

Let’s compare on-boarding processes for Mastodon and BlueSky

How to join Mastodon:

• First pick an instance!

User: What is «instance»?

• Lectures user for 10 min. over what federation is, comparing it to email federation

User: Ok… but what instance should I use?

• You gotta figure that out yourself!

User: picks random instance.

Now one of these things happen

1. Every thing goes well

2. They pick a small instance with almost nobody in it, complain that there is no-one there and leave or the instance gets shut down.

3. They pick an instance centered around something they are not interested because they had no info on what each instance is like other than a small description that doesn’t give you a good idea of what the average post is like.

No matter which one happens, if they stick around, things like this will pop up:

Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”.

Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.

Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:

No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.

I made a post on asklemmy asking why people were choosing BlueSky over Mastodon and not understanding federation was one of the major pain points.