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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There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
Note that Mississippi's requirements go far beyond the Online Safety Act, MIssissippi's law, HB 1126, requires age verification for all users, and parental consent for users under 18., no matter what the content of the site is. Last week the US Supreme Court declined to block the law while it's being challenged in the courts, even though Kavanaugh described it as "likely unconstitutional".
The law clearly should be found unconstitutional - the amicus brief from @CenDemTech, @eff et al discusses why. Still, with the current Supreme Court, who knows; they just the (somewhat narrower) Texas age verification law also should have been found unconstitutional, but SCOTUS said it was okay. So who knows. And of course this is exactly the kind of chilling effect they're aiming for, which is why it's so disappointing that SCOTUS didn't block its enforcement until the case is heard.
As far as I know there isn't any guidance yet for people running fedi instances (or message boards, which are also covered). If you're running a US-based fedi instance, it's might well be worth talking to your lawyer about this. Here's the legislation, and here's the langauge from Section 4 (1)
"A digital service provider may not enter into an agreement with a person to create an account with a digital service unless the person has registered the person's age with the digital service provider. A digital service provider shall make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of the person creating an account with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the information management practices of the digital service provider."
"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
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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.
Thanks for the update. It really is exhausting, and depressing; you're right about Wyoming being next, and there's loads of others out there as well.
And It really is our fight to. Laws like this are part of a worldwide attack on independent social media, as well as trans and queer people, people looking for reproductive health care, youth in general, and sex workers. It's a really challenging situation.
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There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
Note that Mississippi's requirements go far beyond the Online Safety Act, MIssissippi's law, HB 1126, requires age verification for all users, and parental consent for users under 18., no matter what the content of the site is. Last week the US Supreme Court declined to block the law while it's being challenged in the courts, even though Kavanaugh described it as "likely unconstitutional".
The law clearly should be found unconstitutional - the amicus brief from @CenDemTech, @eff et al discusses why. Still, with the current Supreme Court, who knows; they just the (somewhat narrower) Texas age verification law also should have been found unconstitutional, but SCOTUS said it was okay. So who knows. And of course this is exactly the kind of chilling effect they're aiming for, which is why it's so disappointing that SCOTUS didn't block its enforcement until the case is heard.
As far as I know there isn't any guidance yet for people running fedi instances (or message boards, which are also covered). If you're running a US-based fedi instance, it's might well be worth talking to your lawyer about this. Here's the legislation, and here's the langauge from Section 4 (1)
"A digital service provider may not enter into an agreement with a person to create an account with a digital service unless the person has registered the person's age with the digital service provider. A digital service provider shall make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of the person creating an account with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the information management practices of the digital service provider."
That's easy.
Don't enter into an agreement to create an account. Accounts owned by service providers on behalf of users are a scam anyway.
Instead, let users create their own credentials and allow them to interface with a service. That makes more sense for users anyway, and it sidesteps this sort of nonsense.
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Oh wow, did you post this direct from mastodon just by tagging the community? Didn't realise that works, that's super cool.
You can tell when posts are from mastodon as they are full of twitterisms like hashtags and @User to reply to comments
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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
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.
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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.
It‘s not only the registration, it‘s the complete usage of the service. Tricky thing.
In my eyes, this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mississippi now, what reason comes next? DJT wanting to exclude specific groups of users? Cut off whole countries? Who knows... There will be additional reasons and if you ask me, this is just the beginning with the ugly potential to turn into censorship.
Got the point, but surely they will have more legal tools than I do with my single-user Mastodon-instance - which has registrations disabled, but doesn‘t prevent any country from reaching it.
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It‘s not only the registration, it‘s the complete usage of the service. Tricky thing.
In my eyes, this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mississippi now, what reason comes next? DJT wanting to exclude specific groups of users? Cut off whole countries? Who knows... There will be additional reasons and if you ask me, this is just the beginning with the ugly potential to turn into censorship.
Got the point, but surely they will have more legal tools than I do with my single-user Mastodon-instance - which has registrations disabled, but doesn‘t prevent any country from reaching it.
️The way I view it is that Bluesky is a new company that is growing fast, while a site like Pornhub has been around longer and I'm sure has a large legal team that monitors laws all the time. If Pornhub said it was better to cut their losses and see if waiting out and or not seeing a good legal standing to fight with these states, Bluesky likely didn't have much of a chance.
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That appears to be you avoiding explaining how a CEO of a for-profit company could censor an entire "decentralized" "open source" app for millions of people.
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Usually Lemmy/PieFed use the first line of a Mastodon post as the title. You shouldn't need a CW for that.
@squirrel you're right, and in fact it did it that way even though there was a CW on this post for the Mastodon audience. It's a good example of it not really being what I wanted. Admittedly, my bad, I should have taken Lemmy's behavior into account and crafted a first line that would also work well as a title!
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Yes and these comments also show up on mastodon.
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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.
Have you blocked the UK as well then? Same sort of thing here.
Otherwise why can't you ignore Mississippi but can ignore the UK?
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That appears to be you avoiding explaining how a CEO of a for-profit company could censor an entire "decentralized" "open source" app for millions of people.
@Kirk they aren't censoring the entire network, just their official client app for it
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@Kirk they aren't censoring the entire network, just their official client app for it
wrote last edited by [email protected]More evasion. "Client" is Bluesky's techno jargon for "app". You still need a BlueSky account to use a client. And you can't get one of those in Mississippi.
Maybe it would help your argument that the thing BlueSky themselves says is happening is not really happening if you could produce a BlueSky post
that is available inposted from Mississippi? -
Have you blocked the UK as well then? Same sort of thing here.
Otherwise why can't you ignore Mississippi but can ignore the UK?
On feddit.online I block both the UK and France in addition to Mississippi. However, I believe in a future upgrade, PieFed can be configured to block people from specific countries from accessing NSFW and NSFL communities (feddit.online doesn't allow NSFL communities). When that upgrade happens, I will open it again to the UK and France but keep it closed for Mississippi.
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More evasion. "Client" is Bluesky's techno jargon for "app". You still need a BlueSky account to use a client. And you can't get one of those in Mississippi.
Maybe it would help your argument that the thing BlueSky themselves says is happening is not really happening if you could produce a BlueSky post
that is available inposted from Mississippi?@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)
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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.
