Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
(techcrunch.com)
from throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to fediverse@lemmy.world on 29 Aug 16:45
https://lemmy.nz/post/27484636
from throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to fediverse@lemmy.world on 29 Aug 16:45
https://lemmy.nz/post/27484636
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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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.
For real. I want me and my family to leave the United States. Bringing the entire family to a whole new life abroad is a very tall order.
And even there. There's no guarantee. Going to Europe where fascists in Russia, Hungary, etc loom? Maybe you'll be safe a little longer somewhere on the Asian continent with the currently slower rolling fascist forces there. But it's only temporary. You can't ultimately escape.
The question is. Where well the breaking point be for most people. What event will cause the public to drag these fuckers from their homes and hold them responsible. Because that's what it's going to take. For them to remember that they rely on us. Not only for their wealth. But continued existence. Only when that fear has been driven into them, will things even start to get better.
And it might surprise us. It may just be a red state that does it. One of these Republican sycophants getting dragged from a town hall. Assaulted by a whole community for their rolls in making things worse for everyone. Police are going to have a hard time locking up a whole town. And these elected ghouls that love to ignore their constituents will reel in terror. To be clear, violence isn't the answer. Fear is. The fear of knowing we far outnumber them. That they could be subject to violent accountability at any moment. Dragged from their safe beds even.
Fear backed by the threat of violence.
Look, I hate violence. But anyone who says “violence isn’t the answer” clearly hasn’t read a history book. It’s nearly always how things are changed (for better or worse).
Violence is the answer for authoritarians. But it never lasts. Because it's just a tool. The answer is respect, justice, and consent.
Without them you end up in inane cycles of violence like we have now.
People fleeing fascism are just hoping other people will be forced to fight it and win before it gets to them. No matter what happens, eventually some people will have to stand and fight it. There is nothing wrong with deciding that the time to stand and fight it has come. It is scary, yes. It has been a long time since we have had to fight fascism. We might feel like we have forgotten how. But we will learn quickly. The same technology that enables them also enables us in ways just as profound, maybe more profound. Vive la resistance!
Fair enough. In that case I wish you a very successful revolt, that you or those aligned with it hunt down and eliminate the fascists so they can’t come for you never, nowhere.
If they’re coming no matter where Id recommend anyplace that lets you keep a firearm and to stay away from anywhere that doesn’t. Unless anyone’s come up with a better way to stop fascists in the past 80 years, there’s really only one solution. If you don’t want to be part of the solution then you may as well stay right where you are and hope someone else does it for you.
Firearms are a double edged sword. Maybe they help, maybe they hurt. But when society turns against you, and no place is safe for you. All the guns in the world even in the face of an unarmed populace won't save you.
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
Sure would be nice to be privileged enough to be able to relocate myself and my family.
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
It’s not always easy to just pick up and leave somewhere. Especially somewhere as big as Texas.
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.
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.
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So far their efforts in various forms of voter suppression have prevented that, and at the same time more people equals more congressional seats.
You want to put those “more enlightened people” at risk of being Gestapo’d or killed? We need them where they can actually do a net positive effect!
First clean up the shit in Texas (or any other fascist shithole) and make it livable, then live there.
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.
I don’t think that comparison is as unequivocal as you seem to think. Sure, I bet it’s more likely than not that the average person has any of those attachments, but some people don’t. Maybe their job is a dead end, their family is abusive or toxic, their money is a sunk cost, their studies are related to a futile program, and they just need someone to put a bug in their head.
I was abused, manipulated, homeless, with 30k stuck in a scam and not a penny to my name, trying to get into triangle tech. I had every reason to stay. But my closest friend told me to run the fuck away and never look back - I had never considered it. Best advice I ever got and it saved my life. And triangle tech was just another scam.
You never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doing what’s right doesn’t always mean doing what’s easy.
It sometimes isn’t possible, e.g. work or family
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.
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.
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
You mean “at which point, people will just say ‘oh, ok’”. (Assuming they even notice)
“People” will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it
One… Not so disappointing fact is that means at least the Internet will go back to the pre-social media era.
You can feel it here on Lemmy still. It exists.
Yes it has its perks
Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.
I used to think about this via mesh networks as simply routers, but now with nostr, IPFS, atProto and that new BT messaging stuff Jack Dorsey is on. Technically you could utilize your phone as an access point to the mesh network as you move around the city and load all the comms in the background. The latency would be high, but it could work. Also with 5g tech nowadays long range mesh networks are much more feasible albeit probably expensive for a hobbyist.
Are there now legal means to do longer range communications? I thought the main limitation was you need to be licensed to do anything more than short range home wifi
I mean it’s all licensed by the frequency and antenna transmit power, so long distance is possible with the right choice of protocol, antenna and frequency you can get a surprisingly long distance with unlicensed spectrum. Ubiquity makes some directional antenna for wirelessly connecting 2 sites that operate in the 2.4 and 5ghz ranges that can connect over distances of multiple kilometers
So what do you propose? People who aren’t able should set up nodes?
Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof
I say that as a freifunk participant
Yeah. What I propose is getting more people involved and caring about freedom preserving technologies before it gets to that point. A tiny minority of somewhat more tech literate people are not going to be magically immune to authoritarian checkmate scenarios through technical solutions alone.
For the last 20+ years, I’ve been trying to get people to understand the point of free and open formats with pretty much zero success. For the most, they just don’t care if somebody else owns all they data. Maybe if something really bad was to happen to them or a loved one as a result, they’d change their mind. Then I’d get to tell them “that’s what I’ve been telling you for literally decades”, but what would be the point?
Not technical people will never get it.
How can you know the success is zero? Encryption is more widely used and much more resistant to political attack. Open source software is more powerful and accessible. A large portion of people loathe corporate tech platforms at a level they didn’t years ago. Granted a lot of that is just down to how functional or trustworthy the software is, and what guarantees about it can be plausibly provided, and it isn’t all wins. Maybe you can’t exactly get everyone caring about this stuff in the same way or for the same reasons you do. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible avenues to success, or that the tech habits of other groups can be written off as useless here, because it’s probably the most important thing.
Except we'll have to keep using it because the rest of our families and friends are going to still be on there or pester us about why we aren't there with them to share photos of your sister-in-law's baby photos and videos and your aunt Tammy's vacation photos.
Yup
Like Metastatic on LoRA?
Or maybe we’ll use software defined radios (SDR) to transmit on other unregulated bands (as a hacker, you can often force the software to believe it’s in the wrong region to transmit on bands the FTC didn’t approve, as long as it’s legal somewhere.)
I didn’t know there were unregulated bands. I thought pretty much everything except 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz required licensing and those two were technically unlicensed, but still regulated.
What’s in a name? Legally speaking, your brain and nervous system would be classified as an ‘unintentional radiator’ (MRIs work because of this fact) and as such would fall under regulated devices if we weren’t legal persons.
I used ‘unregulated’ (errantly if you insist) to mean both unlicensed and also use cases where FCC isn’t actively enforcing the regulations on the books, cause technically virtually everything is ‘regulated’.
Ok, that makes sense. Thanks!
Meshtastic will never replicate anything like the modern internet. It’s slower than 1980s dialup data speeds. Text messaging, maybe…but you ain’t sending a video through it, that’s for sure.
That’s probably a better idea. I haven’t actually looked into how that works.
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?
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.
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?
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.
The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It’s complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they’re a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you’re always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you’ll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.
To some degree you could, but you’d either rely on Tier1 transits to access the entire internet (costly), or you’d use IXPs (keeping your traffic local to other IX participants).
This doesn’t account for how’d you’d actually go into purchasing a port for your residential home, which would probably entail laying your own fiber to a data center nearby.
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
Flash drives of banned foreign films are the one method of accessing foreign media that north Koreans realistically have. It’s extremely hard to prevent people plugging a flash drive into their computer in their home to view some media
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Latency is horrific though.
That’s why I find systems designed for high latency by being “offline-first” interesting. Sync large quantities of information when you can, then consume offline. Like Usenet and email used to be. Most things don’t actually need to be “instant”.
All they have to do is send a few crews with log dipoles or yagis. Take a few operators down and charge them with terrorism or something and a critical mass will stop using it.
We have the tech for drones sweeping everything everywhere with sensors. Cameras, radios, microphones, IR…
At some point you’re just going to need to start shooting the fascists
Meshtastic, baby!!
If you mean an HTTPS ban, it’s technically possible, but even mainland China and Russia haven’t gone that far. One major reason is that it would completely undermine basic internet security. It would instantly make man-in-the-middle attacks trivial, letting anyone sniff purchases, transactions, and more. Buying anything online - or using a credit card at all - would suddenly become extremely risky.
I have absolutely no idea what any of that is after tor. I have heard of i2p but I forget
Could you be responsible for what someone else does while your using the network then?
Only if you’re deliberately running an exit node (doing so requires special setup).
Sorry, I meant in i2p
Pretty much impossible within I2P
no, unless you run an outproxy. traffic of other routers that goes trough yours is encrypted in multiple layers, so you are not responsible for what that traffic holds.
Me either, so I’m searching up what I can and bookmarking it to read later. There’s always more to learn!
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
If the internet were fully controlled, you’d need mesh networks - DIY, decentralized networks using radios, local connections, or other alternative infrastructures. I don’t know all the details, but Yggdrasil is a promising modern project that functions as an alternative “internet” for mesh networks, while also working over the regular internet.
Within the normal internet, the most resilient solution against heavy censorship is probably Shadowsocks. It’s widely used in mainland China because it can bypass full-scale DPI (deep packet inspection) by making traffic look like normal HTTPS. There are ways for authorities to detect it, and there are counter-methods, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for evading state-level traffic filtering.
Next in line are Tor and I2P. Both are very resilient, and blocking them completely is difficult. It’s a continuous cat-and-mouse game: governments block some bridges or entry nodes, but new ones appear, allowing users to reconnect.
Finally, regular VPNs are useful but generally less resilient. They’re the first target for legal restrictions and DPI filtering because their traffic patterns are easier to detect.
Overall, for deep censorship resistance, it’s a hierarchy: mesh networks > Shadowsocks > Tor/I2P > standard VPNs. You can ask chatbots about any of these and usually get accurate, practical advice because the technical principles are public knowledge.
Couldn’t the US hypothetically put a clause in some ‘online safety’ law conveniently deanonymizing Tor given they own most of the exit nodes?
Owning a lot of Tor exit nodes doesn’t automatically deanonymize users. Exit nodes only see the traffic as it leaves Tor toward the clearnet, not the original sender. To actually identify someone, you’d need to match their traffic entering the network with the traffic exiting - a correlation attack - which requires visibility on both ends. The US doesn’t “own most exits” either; the network is run by many independent operators, and the Tor community actively monitors for malicious relays. Even if a law forced US exit operators to log everything, that alone wouldn’t deanonymize anyone unless combined with large-scale surveillance of entry traffic, which is extremely resource-intensive and not guaranteed to work. In practice, governments can make running exits legally risky, but they can’t just legislate Tor anonymity away.
Governments also need regular users on Tor for it to function properly, otherwise it becomes easier to track down who is targeting you, most likely another government if they are the only ones with “legal” access.
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.
In my experience, if you have anything but “Network: OK” status (for example, “Network: Firewalled”), it’s not working properly. If you’re behind a VPN, you need to port-forward and properly configure a port in I2P config/settings. Another sign that it’s misconfigured is 0 participating tunnels. This is how properly configured I2P network statistics looks like with high internet bandwidth:
spoiler
<img alt="" src="https://ani.social/pictrs/image/c112238f-d459-441d-a132-c3c6600e351a.webp">
Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.
sometimes routers go offline before their routing commitments expire (12 minutes). maybe all your HTTP proxy tunnels got disconnected. Increasing the backup tunnel count could help
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.
Confirm your URL? Domain is registered but not linking back to a website.
it’s still in the works friend!! Making the whole thing from scratch with some cameron’s world esque aesthetics and a unique landing page. I can definitely let you know when its live :) appreciate the interest.
Hi I have no idea what any of that means. Please let me join this class.
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.
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.
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It’s never really about the kids.
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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.
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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
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?
How is this legal?
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.
TBH, ISP blocking is easily circumvented with DOH
Wow, that’s fucked up.
Yeah, the soccer industry is full of some of the scummiest people on earth.
There’s a lot of money to be made off of idiots who don’t know any better for doing pretty much nothing.
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.
So, in other words, corruption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are not the only choices… not everyone can/will be fined (example: Pirate Bay)
Why are we focusing on mastodon.social? I’m not even a fan of mastodon.social. I’m not really interested in their original discussion either. Honestly I kinda hope mastodon.social does comply or lock users out so that users spread out more to other instances instead. But they aren’t even close to the majority of the Fediverse anyways.
There are plenty of instances hosted in different countries that won’t care about this law, or you can self host.
You do know that Eugen developed the Mastodon software, right? He’s not advocating for mastodon.social, he’s advocating for Mastodon.
I’m just talking about the Fediverse. Sure ATProto can theoretically avoid this too but they don’t have as many choices for instances, if any at all that are outside the US and federated with Bluesky? And it seems like self hosting is much harder.
We are focusing on mastodon.social because you jumped on a thread about mastodon.social confirming they won't be complying with Mississippi's age verification law, which in turn is a follow up to coverage of Bluesky doing the same thing. And also because Eugen Rochko jumped into that announcement to claim that Bluesky stepping away from that territory was an example of how Fedi's wider decentralization was an advantage, even though it turned out to no be an advantage at all.
Why would we be talking about anything else? That's literally the topic. You may be looking for a different thread. If anything, the uncontrolled impulse to talk about the ways in which AP is more decentralized than AT whether that's relevant to the conversation or not is the exact communication mistake Eugen made. Which makes doing that again even weirder.
To be clear, it doesn't matter where your instance is hosted. Mastodon.social is not hosted in Mississippi, either, it's hosted in Berlin. You're still taking on a TON of potential liability if you don't comply with their age verification or block that territory from access if the law stays in the books, just like you're risking a ton of liability if you breach GDPR even if your site isn't in the EU.
The title says Mastodon, not mastodon.social, and it appears that Eugen was talking about the Fediverse or Mastodon, not mastodon.social specifically (hence the word decentralization, the discussion was not centralized on mastodon.social).
I think people are mixing up the discussion between Mastodon vs mastodon.social too much. Eugen and his non-profit are the developers of Mastodon, so it makes sense for them to be talking it up.
That quote from the article does NOT say mastodon.social
There are other countries… watch and see how many instances just ignore the law, there will be many in the Fediverse.
I mean Pirate Bay is still running lol, so yeah I think decentralization works
No, the article is about Mastodon.social's nonprofit following up with an official statement after not responding when approached about the original report.
Eugen himself was just shitting on Bluesky, his entire comment was that Bluesky leaving showed "why true decentralization is important". Ironically, that whole pissing match ended up hinging about how much Eugen was focusing on Bluesky rather than their protocol, too. Turns out to be a popular deflection and it turns out to not change anything practical.
You are retroactively trying to reinterpret the subject matter here to save face and I'm too tired right this minute to entertain it. We don't have to have a conversation, man, no hard feelings, but if you insist on having one here I'd appreciate if it wasn't about something else entirely.
Are you talking about Mastodon gGmbH? joinmastodon.org/de/about
github.com/mastodon
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.
And who are they going to address that fine to? Tell them to shove it up their fucking arse as their laws mean nothing to you if you don’t live there.
Yeah, well, remind me not to do business with you under any circumstances.
Self hosting is cool and all, but if you think decentralized networks and services are a get out of jail free to bypass regulations applying to their centralized counterparts you shouldn't be hosting decentralized networks and services.
For one thing if you have no understanding of legal compliance I don't want you to store any of my data at all.
I don’t need to comply with American laws as I am not American. Their law literally does not apply to me
If you run a social media platform that hosts American users they actually might.
Same as the bar for whether GDPR applies to you isn't whether your server is physically in the EU, it's whether you're processing data from EU users. Or, in fact, how you're supposed to get explicit permission from EU users to host their data anywhere outside the EU in the first place.
Now, I'm not a lawyer in Mississippi, so I'm not gonna give you legal advice, but I would definitely look into it if I'm setting up a public instance. The same way I'd be looking into what compliance things I need to do to host people's data, both due to GDPR and due to other privacy laws around the world. It's one thing to set up for friends and family, but if you're hosting data from outsiders you probably need to understand what you're doing.
I've also not looked into what happens if you are sharing data with a noncompliant server in a restricted territory (so someone is self hosting in Mississippi and then federating with your server elsewhere). I don't think the legislators who wrote this dumb rule know, either. They clearly haven't thought that far ahead. Common sense dictates that the outside server would be fine and it'd be the local server's problem to be compliant. I presume that's what Bluesky is counting on (i.e. that someone will set up a local instance and act as an ingest bridge for them without it having to be them). Then again, you have British legislators now claiming that all VPNs need to have age controls, so I am not taking common sense for granted when it comes to these things.
How exactly do they plan on enforcing a fine when you have no business in their country? It works on companies that have an actual presence there. But if you just don’t care about that country you could completely ignore it.
Yeah, see, I'm not a lawyer, but I am confident enough that "committing crimes in another country remotely is safe" is absolutely terrible legal advice. Don't do that. I am confident enough in my understanding of legal matters to issue that recommendation.
I mean, I've given Rochko crap here for not thinking things through when he incorrectly suggested more decentralization would make Masto behave differently than Bluesky in this issue. I don't for a second assume he meant "because fuck it, fine me if you can, USA" or I would be giving him way more crap and closing my Masto account just in case for good measure.
“Mississippi has a backwards-ass age verification requirement. We’re not allowed to let users in from Mississippi. Verify you’re not in Mississippi”
<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.
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.
Sadly they were all tripping over each other for a taste of that sweet extortion money.
but then they wouldn’t get all the user information
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.cif.su/pictrs/image/7009e470-45ff-401d-abdf-aaf508ec52e6.jpeg">
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
OPPO is doing just fine and it’s Chinese with Huawei investment
Does the law in Mississippi apply to the geographic region and airspace, or only residents?
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…)
veilid is a framework designed for hosting completely anonymous P2P apps. They already have a chat app reference implementation - (think P2P signal) and there are others popping up like vdrop
You can play multiplayer games with LAN support together for free using a program like Hamachi.
Use a free VPN (riseup.net/en/vpn) to download the game for free. I usually go for fitgirl repacks if they’re available. Then you and your buddies can connect to the same ‘server’ using Hamachi and play together.
I recommend doing this with the new Halo collection and Baldur’s Gate 3 so you can see it’s possible, even with new and advanced games.
Brains > wallets, don’t be a corporate simp.
Nostr solves the centralized hosting problem the current fediverse has. It’s still being developed, though, and is mostly used by crypto bros at the moment.
I am looking into Nostr, but the convos there are heavy on bitcoin and other crypto, not a big fan of that.
Keet, is a messaging app! It’s in beta right now, but its already pretty stable and has a ton of promise!!
More info= works kinda like torrents - your client’s IP & connectivity info is encrypted, then distributed across their ‘hyperDHT’. Users you’ve connected with can ping the DHT to get your current IP info, then you establish a direct connection to whoever you’re chatting! File shares are also accomplished over that DHT, so you can send files of any size, even terabytes!
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…
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.
Yeah, considering it is not impossible to geoblock per instance, they could.
Push to decentralize, that is to push users from more popular instances to less popular ones, would be good then I guess.
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.
The thing is that works fine for the people pushing this kind of legislation. They hate how easy it is right now to spread inflammation and opinions, how quickly people can organize. This isolates their little fiefdoms and makes them easier to control.