Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws (techcrunch.com)

submitted 1 month ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.

The social non-profit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.

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[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The title says Mastodon, not mastodon.social, and it appears that Eugen was talking about the Fediverse or Mastodon, not mastodon.social specifically (hence the word decentralization, the discussion was not centralized on mastodon.social).

I think people are mixing up the discussion between Mastodon vs mastodon.social too much. Eugen and his non-profit are the developers of Mastodon, so it makes sense for them to be talking it up.

“One of the reasons Mastodon was founded was to allow different jurisdictions to have social media that is independent of the U.S.,” per the statement shared with TechCrunch. “People are free to choose to have their account on a Mastodon server whose policies meet their needs.”

That quote from the article does NOT say mastodon.social

To be clear, it doesn’t matter where your instance is hosted. Mastodon.social is not hosted in Mississippi, either, it’s hosted in Berlin.

There are other countries... watch and see how many instances just ignore the law, there will be many in the Fediverse.

I mean Pirate Bay is still running lol, so yeah I think decentralization works

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago

No, the article is about Mastodon.social's nonprofit following up with an official statement after not responding when approached about the original report.

Eugen himself was just shitting on Bluesky, his entire comment was that Bluesky leaving showed "why true decentralization is important". Ironically, that whole pissing match ended up hinging about how much Eugen was focusing on Bluesky rather than their protocol, too. Turns out to be a popular deflection and it turns out to not change anything practical.

You are retroactively trying to reinterpret the subject matter here to save face and I'm too tired right this minute to entertain it. We don't have to have a conversation, man, no hard feelings, but if you insist on having one here I'd appreciate if it wasn't about something else entirely.