Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!

I studied at the PR in question and that’s not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.

Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I’d absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user’s active permission.

Basically it’s a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user’s hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.

Mind you, I feel there’s also value in loud non-compliance and I’m glad some are taking that road – keep it up, folks. But I’m leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.

That’s something I wondered about the person who implemented this too, I wonder if it was an attempt to install a bare minimum to say “There. We did it. Leave us alone.” Instead of leaving it up to the government to force the issue, and he’s getting absolutely raked over the coals for it.

If that’s the case, I feel terribly bad about this backfiring so hard on him. I do think we should be putting up a lot more resistance before resorting to something like this though.

Some others have also suggested that this was done out of spite, however after reading the github I didn’t see anything said to support that. Are you sure you’re not reading something into this that’s not there?

I’ll be honest I haven’t dug into the GitHub transcripts.

Are you sure you’re not reading something into this that’s not there?

Absolutely not sure! In fact my first inclination leans towards the cynical “This is totally a pro-authoritarian virtue signal move.” Because that’s seemingly everything nowadays.

But also I know things are seldom as they first seem. So I’m at least curious about this guy’s actual motives. Coming out of nowhere just for this contribution is hecka sus though.

I don’t like any of it. I looked to the Internet and open source to escape that petulant normie-verse of endless rage and braindead legislation. And they’re coming to assimilate us like they do everything else. :(