What are your thoughts on the new EU Digital Services Act?

I think it's the first law that companies will take seriously as it has % penalty instead of traditional "part of doing business" fine.

I can only hope a similar law passes elsewhere or devices that comply with them are easily importable.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it actually applied. I hope it uses Matrix for interop as I understand it would make bridges an official "feature" rather than a TOS-breaking unreliable hack. I hope it gets applied to Discord as well, since my university requires me to be in their guild so I've had to create an account and install the app. I also hope to see calls covered, so I can call people from Matrix who are on Facebook Messenger, for example.

There's some good stuff in there and it's easy to cheer for some big new regulatory burdens being put on Google and Facebook, but it's slightly chilling to think what it'd be like if they eventually try to apply it to the fediverse. It sets up teams of what it calls "trusted flaggers" for example, whose job it will be to scour the net for anything they believe to be "illegal content" and order it removed. I imagine they'd start with places like c/piracy, but once such a vast apparatus for net censorship is set up who knows where else it might start looking. They'll use it to go after sellers of "counterfeit" goods as well. Imagine your instance admins being forced to go through some kind of appeals process to take down posts they don't like, but being required to instantly take down posts the government doesn't like.

I don't know, it's pretty complicated but there are some reasons to be slightly worried about it I guess.