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.

The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.)

“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.

  • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    12 days ago

    There’s a fundamental fact that people fail (or refuse) to grasp about decentralized services like Mastodon (and Lemmy) - they don’t actually exist in any standard sense.

    “Mastodon” is really just a handy collective name for the ad hoc community of innumerable individual sites that each independently run the Mastodon software.

    And yes, as Rochko notes, there is nobody who can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi (or for the fediverse to do or not do any other thing). It’s necessarily up to the individual instance owners to do as they see fit. And that’s very much the point.

    It astonishes me how many people can’t seem to wrap their heads around that simple but crucial fact.