Do they have any rule that says you need a minimum number of users on a site to fall under the law?
If servers of someinstance.co.au fine if they move to hosting in Finland?
It just feels like a nightmare.
On reddthat, we got this notice in an announcement back in March 2025:
Age Restriction
Effective immediately everyone on Reddthat needs to be 18 years old and futher interaction on the platform confirms you are over the age of 18 and agree with these terms.
If you are under the age of 18 you will need to delete your account under Settings
This has also been outlined in our signup form that has been updated around the start of February.
March? Over 18?
Reddthat presumably was reacting to the Online Safety ACT UK there.
We discussed it in the community posts back in Dec 2024 when the law passed – February is when the sign up change happened and March was when the announcement went up. The UK’s bullshit may be what prompted the announcement happening then though.
Yeah, but what I mean is that wasn’t a reaction to Australia here. Since your threshold here is 18, not 16.
reddthat is an instance hosted in Australia; so the answer to “how will the ban affect it” is “we already have an age limit in place”. That’s my point.
IIRC moving the instance won’t be helpful - the issue is the servicing of minors, not where the service is. And while the server being in a different country might be a bit of a roadblock for legalities, the general consensus is, like with GDPR - if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws, therefore need to make your instance unavailable to children.
if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws,
How does this even work? This is among the stupidest arguments I’ve ever heard on the internet, at about the same level of flat-earthism.
Are you saying if I am in Italy, selling Italian good on an Italian shop set in an Italian street, and an Australian tourist sends an agent to walk the Italian street and buy a thing for them from my Italian stand, I am somehow beholden to Australian law? This but “oN tHE iNtErNeT”?
This is a complex issue and both of the comments above are way oversimplifying it…
Lots of governments around the world are nowadays claiming that their laws apply to all or many websites that can be accessed in their borders. Whether they can enforce this if the website has no physical assets in the country is a very different question. They could arrest their operators when they enter their countries (as happened to Pavel Durov), or they could geoblock websites, or… here are some starting points for further research:
- https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/88635/can-the-uk-government-do-anything-about-a-foreign-media-platform-rooting-for-civ
- https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/20490/what-politically-can-be-done-to-compel-global-compliance-by-google
- https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/
Apparently aussie.zone is asking users to DM evidence of being over 16, and the implication is that of those who don’t - he’ll ban/delete their accounts.
But absurdly enough, 4chan is exempt from this because all activity on there is anonymous. Not through accounts. So if the Fediverse had anonymous, non-account posting on-top of regular account-based posting then people could post anonymously happily, but anyone with an account would have to verify.
Make it make sense.
But absurdly enough, 4chan is exempt from this because all activity on there is anonymous.
Don’t think that’s it, it has no footprint in Australia. Meta, &Google, X etal all do, same as piefed.social, lemmy.world etal have no Australian base. aussie.socal users can just move to another server. I’m an Aussie.
Similarly UK has tried to get 4chan, kiwifarms etc but they have no UK footprint so they just ignore them.
Similarly UK has tried to get 4chan, kiwifarms etc but they have no UK footprint so they just ignore them.
No, that’s a matter of enforcement. UK is still trying to fine 4chan - but failing. Australia has just outright said the law doesn’t apply to them.
Oh, apparently their attempt at following the law is pretty ridiculous. https://aussie.zone/post/27246692
pretty ridiculous
In the good way, yes. Who was it the admin of a Lemmy instance, I think, who said he would receive alcohol as a form of ID verification because to even acquire it legally in the first place you have to be of age, anyway? That’s pretty much golden and incentivizes the local economy!
Local? They’d be getting alcohol from all around the world :D
Well, they’d be supporting their local businesses for that I’d hope!
