There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
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@Kirk Are you there or do you have a VPN there? I have no way of checking how things are looking from those IPs (ProtonVPN has some US addresses, but none in that state)
I am there and it's not available.
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I am there and it's not available.
@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
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@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
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That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/
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That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
@Kirk Are you talking about reading posts or making posts or what? You said "produce a BlueSky post that is available in Mississippi", you can view that link in Mississippi.
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Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.
We've done it before.
Back when reddit was young, before social media apps captured the content. It just doesn't matter now. Critical mass of the internet is corporations.
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@Kirk Are you talking about reading posts or making posts or what? You said "produce a BlueSky post that is available in Mississippi", you can view that link in Mississippi.
You're right good job lol you managed to evade again.
A CEO is censoring a geographical region. That is just not something that can happen on a decentralized platform.
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Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.
wrote last edited by [email protected]No, "other sites" should disobey unjust laws
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You're right good job lol you managed to evade again.
A CEO is censoring a geographical region. That is just not something that can happen on a decentralized platform.
@Kirk Sigh, I'm not evading… I don't know what else I can tell you.
You said you thought it was open source. I showed you links to GitHub. I said they aren't censoring the entire network, just the official client. You said you wanted proof and to show you how you can view a Bluesky post in Mississippi. I showed you two custom clients that you can access from MS and one of those you can sign up through.
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I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
Do you live in Mississippi? Because there's no reason to capitulate otherwise unless you plan on going there on vacation (no reason to do that either).
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@Kirk Sigh, I'm not evading… I don't know what else I can tell you.
You said you thought it was open source. I showed you links to GitHub. I said they aren't censoring the entire network, just the official client. You said you wanted proof and to show you how you can view a Bluesky post in Mississippi. I showed you two custom clients that you can access from MS and one of those you can sign up through.
But you are evading. The technicalities you speak of are irrelevant to the topic of censorship. The fact that parts of BlueSky are technically open source, or that other BlueSky apps exist is irrelevant to the people who are functionally denied access to speak due to the decision of a single company. There is no other "instance" we can go sign up on like with ActivityPub apps.
(Here is the part where you say I could technically get all my friends to self-host their own PDS as though it is easy and fun).
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Do you live in Mississippi? Because there's no reason to capitulate otherwise unless you plan on going there on vacation (no reason to do that either).
Doesn't work that way. States agree to enforce each other's civil orders
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Doesn't work that way. States agree to enforce each other's civil orders
incorrect actually
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I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
Entirely understandable. Like you say, it's not your fight. This is more so if one creates something and isn't even from the US, if the wankers in a specific US state elect shitty government, that's not on you in a wholly different country to go up against.
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But I thought BlueSky was open source and decentralized? /s
EDIT: In case it's not obvious (as it apparently isn't to OP) if BlueSky was either of those things then it could not be simply shut down by a CEO.
As evident by Lemmy instances not doing the same thing. /s
There's a difference between being decentralized and doing something illegal, you know?
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"It's decentralized! It's open!" they've said. But, despite all doubts from the very beginning, Bluesky is no option for an open and decentralized web at all. There ARE reasons for protecting users under 18, but cutting a whole state off the platform is simply a certain kind of censorship.
There was hope for this service but the crypto-bro-background and the current state of the USA did a complete disservice to the platform, disqualifying it as an alternative for any federated, decentralized and free network like Mastodon and Co.!
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
#fediverse #mississippi #ageVerification
How come plenty federated stuff is also blocking people then? Apparently that alone does not help?
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As evident by Lemmy instances not doing the same thing. /s
There's a difference between being decentralized and doing something illegal, you know?
I agree 100%, BlueSky is not decentralized.
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How come plenty federated stuff is also blocking people then? Apparently that alone does not help?
ActivityPub instances can do whatever the hell they want, the point is that no CEO decided who has access to all of it.
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If you run any instance that is federated and has users that could sign in from that state it makes complete sense to block their IP addresses. Why on earth would someone running a Mastodon instance take on risk unlless they were in another country where there was no risk of repercussions.
If you're just hoping that small fish won't get fried that's possibly true. But admins likely won't want to find out if they will just on principles.
You need to explain why a mastodon instance in a state without those laws care what a different state does
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Other apps can ignore the geoblock. From the Bluesky announcement:
This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently.
Its cute how they pretend at protocol is being used by anyone not named bluesky
