[dzonga]

Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites.

what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord

- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.

for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.

payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.

the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.

[throw7]

Utah was the one I remember... have more states passed laws?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...

[movedx]

This is hard to read, but I think you're saying the Internet will see a shift to "Sneaker Net" like tactics where people torrent stuff, store it on HDDs, and just move those HDDs around? Like they do in Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E

For the most part, I agree.

[inigyou]

Usenet and email were also designed to work like this. The underlying transport layer was called UUCP.