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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[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 65 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The more interesting question is, who would you arrest? Just ignore the law. It's unenforceable when it comes to the fediverse.

[–] DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I think the instance owner would be responsible, but what if the instance is out of the state?

Unless the instance owner is on a visa, with a criminal record they could get him. But otherwise it’s hard to be enforced.

Maybe they could ask the app stores to ban apps in that states. Something like that

Also states could ask ISP blocking the main instances.

[–] Sprawl@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Those hosting the more popular environments. The posts would live on perhaps but target enough people and it likely becomes too small for them to care anymore, sadly.

[–] humanoidchaos@lemmy.cif.su 5 points 3 days ago

All the more reason to host anonymously.

[–] Gigasser@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

Push to decentralize, that is to push users from more popular instances to less popular ones, would be good then I guess.

[–] iglou@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah, considering it is not impossible to geoblock per instance, they could.