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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MudMan@fedia.io -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No, the article is about Mastodon.social’s nonprofit

Are you talking about Mastodon gGmbH? https://joinmastodon.org/de/about

Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit from Germany that develops the Mastodon software. Mastodon started in 2016 as an open-source project by Eugen Rochko

https://github.com/mastodon

Mastodon gGmbH is a German non-profit developing a decentralized social network

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 1 day 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.