Yep. Of course it's still TBD how quickly and how aggressively they start to enforce this aggressively, especially on smaller instances. The law gives them the ability to block access, assign fines, and even file criminal charges against employees of sites that don't comply ... so potentally a very big deal for instances based in the UK, run by UK nationals, or with employees in the UK. For instances not in the UK with no business ties, it could potentially be a choice between getting blocked in the UK and requiring age verification of UK users. Who knows what regulators will actually do, but I'm not surprised Bluesky made the choice they did. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in fedi.

Depressingly, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Austrailia has similar legislation and they're rolling out the regulations, althoug not sure when they kick in for smaller social media sites. Canada's considering similar legislation. France and Denmark have recently called for banning under 15 year olds from social media Europe-wide, and Germany, Greece and Spain are all working on their own regulation. In the US, bunch of states have verification requirements in the US (and while some of the laws are tied up in court, the US Supreme Court has just said that age verification requirements are constitutional so they may well go forward) -- and bad internet bills that would apply ot the US as a whole are going forward. So it really is a mess.

@jsit @Linux @smallcircles