Apparently it is time to say it again: You aren’t helping or achieving anything by squatting onto github/gitlab/irc/etc to tell people, that you think age verification is a bad idea.

1. Nobody involved thinks the laws proposed in some US states are a good idea.
2. There is a more nuanced discussion to be had whether some form of standardized parental controls are, but technical forums aren’t the place to do that either and the situation is heated enough, that even the most socially skilled people aren’t in the mindset for nuanced anymore. (Congrats!)
3. Unfortunately a large part of the FOSS space is financed by companies, who want to continue selling hardware with Linux and we live in a society. So if this becomes law, something will have to give. The correct way to oppose this is by participating in the process. Vote, write to your representatives, etc. (Or viva la revolution, good luck)
4. All you are doing by writing in those pull requests is pilling onto the abuse some of the most burned out people in the industry already experience over this and other even stupider topics.
5. Figuring out the line to walk between designing something adequate to comply to different (existing and proposed, potentially conflicting) legislation and privacy is difficult and you are not doing anybody a favor by making the space to do this in collaboration transparently and openly hostile. Ending up with various different/non-standard stacks to do this would have even worse consequences.
6. If you actually have technical feedback and are up-to-date on all the relevant context, of course you are welcome to participate. But expect to do the work in that case, just complaining will again not help.

Jeez.. people, you aren’t doing better than the wayland haters. And no, just being on the right side of the general debate, doesn’t justify this shit.

@drakulix hot take, but people implementing fascist asks fucking deserve pushback

fuck this tone-policing nonsense

@Ember @drakulix People would be more open to this entire discourse if it wouldn't have been started by a MAGA dude that thinks "woke states" shouldn't enact such legislation to cause harassment.

Yeah people jump at each others throat, because a fash person made a reddit post, congrats.

@karolherbst @Ember @drakulix I haven't read any reddit posts. This shit has come up again and again for years. If we take further steps towards this they'll keep trying to force more shitty things through that end up actually violating privacy more. None of this has ever been about protecting children... It's been about surveillance and control. We don't need any of this. Now, I don't condone harassing people, but we do need to pushback when things matter.
@karolherbst @Ember @drakulix To be clear, by "they" I don't mean the devs implementing this as a reaction to changing laws. I mean the lawmakers making these laws. Although immediately caving and implementing whatever they want doesn't do the devs any favors either.
@tachi it's not even caving because of pressure, it seems a whole lot more like the law just gave them an excuse
@Ember Yeah I'm sure it seems like that in some projects, with some developers. With other projects it does seem like they're being forced into it by various factors so they're trying to make the best of a bad situation. Both situations suck. Pushing back on both devs and lawmakers is needed but honestly I don't expect much from lawmakers. Harrassing isn't how we solve this but pushing back certainly doesn't seem to work either. I have no answers.
@Ember It does suck that this is happening in a lot of core projects though. Countries seem to be able to export their policy to projects that are used globally by everyone and it adversely affects FOSS. If devs don't care about that then the only option we have is to stop using their software.

@tachi hard when it's core sofware, it's not like there's an actual alternative to systemd and the freedesktop stack, or the linux kernel for that matter

also with how many projects are embracing slop it really feels like OSS as a whole is going down in flames, can't avoid it all aside from just, not using computers if at all possible