I doubt it. This is Ofcom you’re talking about. “What’s a Lemmy”? (Said in the voice of Sandor Clegane)

Feddit is actually (presumably) hosted in the UK, so if Ofcom actually knew what the Fediverse is they could start trying to demand they do age verification.

I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.

The OSA bill in the UK has caused a hamster forum to shut down over concerns of not being able to follow it (or the risks associated with non-compliance). It’s an unbelievably wordy and excessive bill that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small communities.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/18/hamster-forum-local-residents-websites-shut-down-new-laws/

Look at what Reddit is saying. It’s absurd:

For UK users under 18, Reddit said it has to restrict sexually explicit content; content that promotes suicide, deliberate self-injury, and eating disorders; content that incites abuse or hatred against people based upon protected characteristics; bullying content; content that promotes violence or “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature”; content that promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries; content that encourages people to use harmful substances or substances in harmful quantities; content that shames people based on body type or physical features; and “content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair.”

WTF? How is this supposed to work? A system that auto-blocks all NSFW tagged content itself as a blunt instrument is viable - but half the stuff on here, on Reddit here isn’t even necessarily tagged as NSFW when its posted. Are extreme mountain biking or skiing or skateboarding or other similar types videos going to be age-gated because they could be content that “promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries”? How do you verify whether or not content specifically romanticises “hopelessness” or “despair” exactly? Are Giles Corey songs now 18+? What does that even mean? Even the writing of it is Orwellian.

It also adds “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature” ???

Are action movie clips now going to be age-gated? Or video game clips? From TV shows and films that are PG-13?

He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.

People need to be the change they want to see. I came here because I wanted to run some communities, but ultimately it was impossible on Reddit. All the names are taken, all the aging mod teams set in stone. You essentially have no meaningful opportunity to build anything new on there. In contrast, and especially with federation, the Fediverse is a completely different system. A fresh start - still after 2 years. And it has way better internal advertisement of communities than Reddit does.

And to be clear, on Reddit you can easily just shout into the wilderness at no-one. Big audience means you can get drowned out.

Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.

No idea, but it’s not an active instance so idk what happened.

I think the core concept of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy can be very valuable but it’s executed very badly. There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).

Neither of these things are logistically viable for a community site that wants any level of consistent engagement. How do you “verify” whether or not a ban from a community was objectively justified? What “tests” should there be for whether or not someone should be able to interact in a community in the first place?

Piefed and Lemmy can mostly communicate with each other. In any case, you can’t really compel Lemmy to update as fast as Piefed is.

There’s two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there’s a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.

I don’t know the details of all decisions lemmy.world instance admins have made, but it seems to me that the #1 instance will always generate the most animosity because it’s far more likely than any other instance to find itself in situations where they’re pressed to make decisions by their userbase.

Servers with 20% of the users and 10% of the communities, with only like a dozen ‘active’ communities will simply hardly ever be in that position and generate no meaningful pushback so they’ll always look good by comparison. Additionally, even lemmy.world community mods can generate hostility based on decisions they made despite them having nothing to do with the instance management - and since lemmy.world dominates, you’re much more likely to be posting in a lemmy.world community.

Depends how interested you are in international content. Netflix has most of that.

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.

So here do you just mean “people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?

There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them “hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon”.

Oh, well I don’t know enough about Peertubes success here. I don’t really use that.

The majority view on “how to best fund the Fediverse” is “set up donations”. Whenever I bring up “I think it’s more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members”, I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

Oh for goodness sake. I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

“Normies”? How?

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?

What reporters?

Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

For the reasons above. It’s not that they are “afraid of growth”, but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

What changes are people afraid of? What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

Why didn’t they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

No idea.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

Yeah, there might be. But it’d have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don’t know of any right now.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.

The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by “Lemmy” I did mean the wider Fediverse.

In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.