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

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Yeah, Mastodon gGmbH also hosts mastodon.social, as far as I can tell. Or… I mean, at least that’s the address and company info they show in mastodon.social’s about page (not Mastodon, but mastodon.social, there are two separate About pages, both reference Mastodon’s gGmbH’s address).

    The one thing I’ll give you is that the statement they issued is talking about Mastodon software overall not having the technical tools to comply with the law in the first place and are explicitly refusing to comment on what mastodon.social will specifically do about it.

    Which is irrelevant because, one presumes, if the answer was to build the tools to be able to comply with the age verification law they would have said that and put them into the Mastodon software, not just kept them exclusively for mastodon.social.