I have just been tossed off Reddit. No bad behaviour but Reddit suspects I am not old enough. I have been an adult for quite a few years. Note that age verification is not (yet) required under EU law.
The age verification on Reddit runs through a third party which is associated with Palantir. I will not do this, and there’s enough data associated with my account to show I’m an adult.
In general I am extremely sceptical of giving this level of personal information to any third party but especially a company that just cannot be trusted and has proven itself to be a destructive force in the world. I would not recommend anyone to use this, even if it may lose you access to platforms.
On Reddit there have been concerns among the various European subs and its community. I have encouraged various mods to collectively search for a solution. A move to Lemmy seems the obvious one - also just for the sake of supporting European tech and platforms. Alas, none have acted. The best I got was ‘good idea, we’ll look into it’.
My guess is I am far from the only one to lose access, if not already than soon the same will happen to other users. It may destroy the community that exists there, and my guess is that it’s the largest online truly pan-European community.
Anyway, I’ve signed up for Lemmy / europe.pub a while ago and am eager to use it instead of Reddit. I just hope this place becomes a little more lively.
Thanks. I find myself struggling a bit with Lemmy.
I check in most days but there’s indeed relatively little going on and there’s not really a blossoming European community. Happy to play my little part but at the same time it has to come down to everyone. I’m not sure what it takes to make it more thriving. Lemmy is nowhere near the numbers of Reddit, obviously, but it’s enough to think more would or could be happening.
As for contributing - I prefer that over here as well, largely for the same reason. At the same time, putting effort into making a post (I am not the type to just post a link or something) you do hope to get some interaction.
It’s really about how many people want to make the effort but also the fediverse remains confusing. Two friends of mine tried to sign up and even with my guidance they couldn’t quite figure it out, had to wait for days to get login credentials, passwords somehow didn’t work… and these are not troglodytes. That is an issue too.