IEEE talking about fediverse

u wot m8

The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it's a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on "social media addiction" was well decided. (in the section "How Governments Are Regulating Social Media")
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section "How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned")

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it's possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn't have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

I disagree. I think that you can have both.

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own. Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T, and so they should be given a longer leash. Governments also do not have the resources to chase down every Tom, Dick, and Harry running a Lemmy server (well, they do, but they shouldn't.)

Whether reality will play out this way is uncertain.