2d ago

Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws

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

Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.

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.

146 comments

There's going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We've had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the "Great Firewall of China" and asking themselves "Can we get something like this over here?"
- This is why it's perfect time to get some tech literacy regarding tor, i2p, yggdrasil, and shadowsocks. It's not perfect solution to use tech to circumvent restrictions that shouldn't be there in the first place, but sometimes it really comes to that point and it's really nice to have all systems ready!
  
  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.
  
  I've tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.
  
  I'm making a website to aggregate all of this information. Pro net neutrality, anti censorship laymens guide. Still in the works but its called zoracle.life.
  
  The situation does seem quite desperate. I'd like to heed your call. Please advise on most critical systems I should have ready right now today please. I know have a lot of work to do and must stay efficient
  
  I have absolutely no idea what any of that is after tor. I have heard of i2p but I forget
  
  Hi I have no idea what any of that means. Please let me join this class.
- If this really about protecting kids, they could've done opt in blocking at the ISP level. Just a few new fields with ISPs and they have products that can take care of this already.
  This is really about tracking every little thing you do online.
  
  Eventually it will be about restricting what we can access on the web.
  
  It's never really about the kids.
  
  No just online.
- staring at the “Great Firewall of China” and asking themselves “Can we get something like this over here?”
  I've just been assuming that was the goal all along.
  Fifteen years ago, I said on Reddit, "The U.S. is trying to become like China before China can become like the U.S." Of course, I got buried.
  
  I've been saying some combination of China and Russia personally. It's easier to parallel now after China took over Hong Kong. Those poor kids fought so hard.
  People need to understand the fascists were watching those instances too and they learned from them. The last 15 years have been like a road map for how to handle dissent and protests in a way that keeps you in power.
- All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn't it?
  Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y'all, while it's still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn't make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.
  
  I like you
- Country level internet and passport control before you visit another country domain is inevitable. That's just like people want it or at least sociopaths.
- Its already happening in Spain. Everyday there is a football match from the spanish league (thats from Friday to Monday, both included) LaLiga orders the ISPs to shutdown everything that uses Cloudflare under the pretext that the shady websites that offers pirated football use their services, killing easily 1/3 of the national traffic for like 4-6h.
  Why the ISPs comply?
  The biggest ISP of the country (Movistar) also happens to be the main one that showcase legal football.
  How is this legal?
  The judge that authorised this and the president of LaLiga have been friends since forever.
  Eventually this will go the European court where they will rule this was illegal and anti-constitutional all along and give a Spain a fine (the the citizens have to pay), and revoke this bullshit, but untill then we are screwed. Nothing will happens to LaLiga, the judge, or Movistar, fucking privileged and corrupted bastards.
  
  Wow, that's fucked up.
  
  TBH, ISP blocking is easily circumvented with DOH
  
  Whoa whoa whoa! Callate chico!
  You copied this from us Italians where we have the friend of Berlusconi providing the State with a censorship system (the Piracy Shield), allegedly exactly for the same reason since 2023.
  Let's give the right Fascists what is theirs.

I agree with mastodon, even though eventually Texas will enact similar legislation forcing me to use a vpn to read it
- Woudn't it be smarter to just leave the hellhole that is Texas? Either to the north or to the south, leaving is a win.
  
  Sometimes there's family or other things you just can't take with you. Support structures you might not have somewhere else. Friends and neighbors. Mutual aid.
  There can be circumstances that override that. But honestly, the more that flee. The easier it is to get what the fascists want. And at best you're only helping yourself short term. Because no matter where you go. They will come for you if they can.
  
  I was fruitful and multiplied, its hard to organize a large migration of people, some of whom want to stay.
  I will travel, but am rather tied to this area, even if I do not see it changing for the better in my lifetime
  
  Rather than encourage people to leave, we should encourage more enlightened people to move there, and change the political climate. A lot of states are closer to flipping than people think, and Texas is one of them.
  
  Are you really so naive that you believe that a VPN subscription is more difficult or a higher bar than actually getting up and moving?
  Potentially meaning you need to find new jobs, new friends, new support structures....etc
  
  Idk about the person you are replying to but I have spent 15 years trying to get out of the state that I am in. It’s really hard to move out of low cost of living areas to higher ones without a job and a lot of planning.
  
  Your answer seems so out of touch with reality. It feels equivalent to suggesting a depressed person to simply don't be sad.
  Moving out to a different state is not easy, either because of family, job, money, studies, life or any other situation.
  
  Sure would be nice to be privileged enough to be able to relocate myself and my family.
  
  It's not always easy to just pick up and leave somewhere. Especially somewhere as big as Texas.
  
  It sometimes isn't possible, e.g. work or family

nobody should comply
- Would have been the smart move for business, too. Just don't comply until everyone else caves and then sue the state for favoring some businesses.
  
  but then they wouldn't get all the user information
  
  Sadly they were all tripping over each other for a taste of that sweet extortion money.
- Huawei was forced to not comply and look what happened to their phones
  
  We are neither as popular as huawei and neither chinese. We will be fine

We need more federation and P2P in everything.
- P2P! I have been screaming this into every forum at reddit since last piece of shit president was president. See? This is why!
  
  What P2P solutions exist that need more attention? I know PeerTube does some neat P2P stuff to keep server load down (if they ever had the traffic...)

The more interesting question is, who would you arrest? Just ignore the law. It's unenforceable when it comes to the fediverse.
- 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.
  
  All the more reason to host anonymously.
  
  Push to decentralize, that is to push users from more popular instances to less popular ones, would be good then I guess.
  
  Yeah, considering it is not impossible to geoblock per instance, they could.
- 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.

Last time i checked "states rights" didn't mean the right to impose your laws on people or businesses running out of other states.
If anyone from Mississippi wants to use our services I'm totally ready to ignore any and all laws that don't acknowledge to sovereignty of the net.
- Last I checked, “rights” now means “my right to control you”
  
  That's always what it meant to Republicans.

Does the law in Mississippi apply to the geographic region and airspace, or only residents?

Also states don't have one company to go after. It is nearly impossible to track down and file court orders for if your lucky non-profits in other countries.
Like I don't think there are many people that host Mastodon instances that will listen to a court order out of the goodness of there heart.

"Mississippi has a backwards-ass age verification requirement. We're not allowed to let users in from Mississippi. Verify you're not in Mississippi"

States should just create a firewall, and not shift burden to supply chains.
- Well they should not do that either, but if they're going to, they should shoulder the burden.

So in this whole embarrassing dick measuring contest Eugen was wrong and Mike Masnick was right, then. Turns out "real decentralization" or not, Masto/Fedi's structure doesn't do anything to bypass this nonsense.
This is not new. People constanty claim AP and Fedi have benefits or features just for being decentralized that they absolutely do not have, but I have to admit I'm kinda shocked that Eugen will do that exact thing without any more self-awareness than the average Masto user. He should know better.
- Well even if mastodon.social complies, there are many many other instances to choose from, from all different countries
  and even other similar platforms like Sharkey or Mbin that work with Mastodon
  
  It doesn't matter, though. They all have the same choice to make: comply, shut down in that territory... or be fined an insane amount.
  Eugen argued... well, pretty much what you are arguing now. The question Bluesky guy posed to him is what Mastodon.social would do and how would the presence of smaller instances prevent the issue, especially for instances without the resources to comply at all in the first place.
  Eugen did not respond to that, but Mastodon.social just did, and the answer is... Mastodon.social will do the same thing as Bluesky and so will every other instance.
  Because of course it's pretty obvious that having a decentralized platform doesn't help with stupid regulation, because stupid regulation applies to every instance. There's no reason decentralization would bypass a blanket requirement unless the legal requirement has carved an exception for smaller platforms (and even then there's a question of what counts as a platform in that scenario).
  And the thing is... I'm okay with you not having though that through, but Eugen certainly must have. Right? I mean, they had a pretty well thought out answer for Techcrunch in 24 hours, they must have given it some thought. It's an unforced communication error.
- Interesting that you think Eugen is the bad guy here.
  
  "The bad guy" is not a thing I've thought about anybody since I was 12 years old.
  I think Eugen jumped onto a common talking point among Fedi people when they try to highlight the difference between Masto and Bluesky and he didn't think it through.
  Like I said, I'm surprised he messed that up. He certainly should know the impression he was giving wasn't accurate.

<insert number of Mastodon instances>
* 10,000
Some lawyer on Capitol Hill: "Hmm..."
Not if, when.
Who knows, the same demand may be given of certain other federated social media sites in a few months.

What's wrong with your own personal 2M band radio network? Or just bring back CB culture. It's in the name: Citizen's Band...

146 comments