i take hope in the collective power of open source. we do not need to use programs contaminated with government spyware, we can build our own. keep demanding security and privacy, and help your community achieve them

i'm on the same boat as you, hearing the news about more and more countries passing age verification have been making me feel hopeless, and I ended up setting up my filters on Mastodon and banning myself from watching news youtubers because of it

the thing is, I also can't go completely offline either, my internet is kind of my lifeline as I wasn't able to make any IRL friends in school, so I rely a lot on Discord for social interaction, I'm essentially a social outcast

2026 has been the wildest year in this decade and might even be worse than 2020 for me, it has also been the roughest year on my mental health because of shit like this

i'm hoping maybe the fediverse and decentralization will save us but i think this is just copium, so

I tried all the OSS IDEs a couple years ago, and I now use vim. (netbeans for java) Says it all really.

Setting the VM up is an absolute pain in the ass, but once it's done it's done and it "just works". You'll also need something like Looking Glass for you to be able to access the VM in a window, or if you have a second monitor you can just make it output to that.

If you do that + give the VM enough cores and RAM, the performance should theoretically be only mildly worse than native. It was good enough for me at least.

But yeah, it's definitely something that'd take an entire weekend to get fully working correctly and with the least amount of pain points possible...

There was an argument around 2022 "We should get an open source EU-wide privacy-protecting ID system and quick, because Apple and Google are sure as fuck going to do their own and if we don't, those will become the de facto standards."

At least in the early design it was supposed to preserve privacy as much as possible. Like, you can make it give a zero-knowledge proof of the boolean "Is this person over 18? Yes or no." without revealing any more information (Name, date of birth, age in years, etc.) The user can know what information the service is getting from it.

And it's open source so everyone can check that the software does indeed preserve privacy the way it should.

At least those were the design criteria going in. I need to check if they became realised.

I don't know, maybe I'm being naive, but overall, I'm glad the EU did this. They're the only Thing who could be big enough and willing enough to make sure a solution like this exists and enough services in the EU offer it as an option alongside just Apple, Google and Palantir that I can hopefully get away without one of the evil companies getting my ID.

And yeah, depressing that it came to this, but given the options in the world atm, I'm glad I'm living in the EU right now.

Plus you can always download pre-ageverif ISO of a system