Your statement was “first took off”. That’s what I was addressing. It definitely hit critical mass later than that, but the first big explosion was the 90s.

It’s hard to imagine now, but, when the internet first took off, Twitter was basically the world’s social media.

That came quite a bit after the internet took off! The world wide web too off in the 1990s, and the broader internet (email, ftp, usenet etc) before that

Welcome!

At about a B1 level. And I specifically speak that variety of Spanish (rioplatense)

I’ve previously lived (short term) in Buenos Aires for a few months as well

I’ve half heartedly been planning a move to Argentina for years now, but Argentina is currently not really a viable option. So as we’re getting closer to it being real rather than just vague plans, we started looking for other options. And Uruguay is a pretty good alternative. And it’s right next door to Argentina :)

Close. Uruguay :P

I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.

Sure, but personally, I don’t want a linux community that’s driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don’t view it as a catastrophe, if that’s the version of “the linux community” that we lose.

None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It’s not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn’t something I’m terribly upset over, because I don’t want the version of community they’re taking us towards

To quote @supakaity in a conversation we just had “Thank fuck we’re getting out of here”

I do. We’re on it already. The whole system is slipping towards an age gated internet, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. That’s the slope. There’s nothing I can do to stop it, whether I’m I stay on or get off.

I don’t believe that dropping my whole OS over a database field will change anything. It won’t stop the devs who are concerned about their legal liability from being doing what they need to do to protect themselves. Some devs will comply, some will walk away from OSS, and some won’t comply. But the bigger the project, the more corporate sponorship it relies on, the more certain it is going to be in the “comply” category, and the truth of that won’t change because users push back.

Which is to say, I don’t believe standing up and rejecting a DB field as a matter of principle will change anything, except to make my life harder.

My line in in the sand isn’t about changing the course of the path we’re on, it’s about my own personal interactions with the system. And being forced to provide my age to interact with the internet is the bit I won’t do. So I will stay with the inevitable creep towards that state until the last possible moment, in the hopes that somehow, I’m wrong, and we avoid this privacy nightmare we’re heading towards. If and when it becomes impossible to interact without providing that data, then that’s where I step off, even if it costs me half the internet.

They’re not the same though. Your method will enable the system to interact meaningfully with an age gated internet. Blank will not. And I won’t be interacting with an age gated internet…

Yeah, decentralisation has a lot of downsides. It’s definitely a barrier to entry for new folk. But at the same time, it has the single most important killer feature available, and that is that it’s can’t be controlled by a single profit driven corporation.

That’s still forcing a DOB, which is the line I won’t cross.

But for me it’s a slippery slope I don’t think we should even get on.

I agree. But the start of the slope isn’t my exit point. My exit point is just before the slope gets too steep to get off.

My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn’t the point where I bin it.

We’ve got instance level disabling of downvotes on lemmy and piefed.

Decentralisation.

I will never use any other kind of social media again.

Think of how shitty and scam filled the early internet was. Did we abandon it because of how shitty it was at first,

It wasn’t though… That was mid to late term internet

I’m not asking you to argue about it. I explicitly don’t want people arguing about it, which I was hoping my previous comment would make clear.

There are people out there that were raised a certain way that want to change or perhaps have questions due to ignorance on the topic. By being combative, you’re doing more harm than good for something you clearly care about.

If someone turns against all trans people because they encounter a single angry trans person, then they were just looking for an excuse to justify what they already felt.

And it’s not my job to play nice with the people trying to erase my rights in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll stop what they’re doing! That doesn’t work. That has never worked. Every single civil right gain has been made by pushing back.

So thanks for the advice, but I’ll keep pushing back

So, you’d like to argue for the validity of excluding a vulnerable group, in the middle of a world spanning hate campaign against that exact group?

What do you want changed then?