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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[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 16 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

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?

[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 18 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] rollin@piefed.social 15 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] rollin@piefed.social 8 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 11 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] turmoil@feddit.org 7 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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.