My latest FOSS Academic post is a doozy.

[rwg@aoir.social]

My latest FOSS Academic post is a doozy. It's "Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On":

https://fossacademic.tech/2026/06/11/reading-digital-safety-act.html

I'm reading Canada's proposed Digital Safety Act. My conclusion is that the proposed regulations could be very burdensome to non-profit, community-run social media, including AoIR.social.

I'd love feedback on this, particularly from Canadian fediverse admins.

#mastodon #fediverse #Canada

[julian@activitypub.space]

@rwg@aoir.social usually there's a carve out for smaller instances. If this affects all social networks regardless of size, this makes my business as a purveyor of hosted forums essentially untenable.

Watching closely.

[packetcat@tenforward.social]

@rwg if the law applies to small instances like Ten Forward then compliance would be an untenable burden for me.

I expect it to not apply to fediverse instances or anything that has less than say, 1M monthly average users, historically such laws have targeted the large social networks.

[oli@olifant.social]

@rwg Hopefully some of the labeling requirements can be handled by this:

https://fires.fedimod.org/

(and some labels: https://fires.1sland.social/labels)

(Mostly using IFTAS labels, but 'Synthetic Media' is one of them.)

[truenorthspice@mastodon.world]

@rwg

you might want to talk with Drew @freezenet who posted the first part of an analysis of the bill.

[freezenet@noc.social]

@TrueNorthSpice @rwg Yeah, I'm still going through this monstrosity of a bill (currently sitting at Section 42), but so far, it's really unclear if Mastodon would be regulated or not. This is because the size of the platform is being left to a future regulatory decision. If it does get swept up into this bill, yes, that is going to be a problem. If not, then Mastodon would get passed over. Which way would things go? Who knows? Even the bill isn't clear on that one.

[freezenet@noc.social]

@TrueNorthSpice @rwg I should probably clarify which section I'm looking at when saying Mastodon may or may not be hit by this. That has to do with Section 8 (it's a bit of a read, but I think that is going to be the the big point of interest in asking if Mastodon is regulated or not under this bill (and the only answer I can provide is "probably not" which is not exactly a conclusive response).Might do a separate writeup on this question as I'm aware of some possible context outside of the bill

[starraven@mastodon.scot]

@rwg

As you said, the devil will be in the details and the details aren't yet available because the Commission isn't in place yet. The user number will be a key point.

However, in practise I suspect they'll have their hands full enough with the major players that they won't have time or resources to examine individual Fediverse instances closely, especially those located outside of Canada. They'd probably shrug it off, or maybe move hosting to an even more difficult country to launch action.