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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[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 85 points 3 days ago (37 children)

Arguably though, at some point they'll just say "if we can't read your traffic, you can't use the Internet."

Which still isn't a problem, as I'm sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it's going to take a while.

[–] einlander@lemmy.world 65 points 3 days ago (35 children)

At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 17 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I don't know literally ANYTHING, so take that into account when answering this, but why can't a single person access the "Internet" on their own, without an ISP. Can't they be their own ISP? Or can't small groups of people - friends, family, co-conspirators - create their own private ISP?

[–] rollin@piefed.social 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But can they only access each other in their own "web?" Can they access the World-Wide Web on their private web? Or does that just expose them to all the other stuff anyway?

[–] rollin@piefed.social 9 points 3 days ago

You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.

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