this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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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."

@fediverse @fediversenews

#fediverse #mississippi #ageVerification

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[–] Jerry@feddit.online 43 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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?

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 7 points 1 week ago

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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[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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).

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Doesn't work that way. States agree to enforce each other's civil orders

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[–] Carighan@piefed.world 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This probably shouldn't be marked NSFW?

[–] thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@naught101 it shouldn't, but anything posted on Mastodon with a CW is marked as NSFW on Lemmy. Similarly when the post bridged to Bluesky it got marked as "graphic media" lol. Not sure there's anything I can do about it in either case.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Oh wow, did you post this direct from mastodon just by tagging the community? Didn't realise that works, that's super cool.

[–] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes and these comments also show up on mastodon.

Most do but not all. And similarly most of the replies on Mastodon show up here but not all. So to follow the entire conversation you have to look in both places.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@naught101 yeah, I just tagged the lemmy community ... and yes it is super cool! although, as the NSFW highlights, somewhat clunky around the edges ... if I don't include a CW here then it figures out the title on its own, and it's not always what I want.

[–] squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago

Usually Lemmy/PieFed use the first line of a Mastodon post as the title. You shouldn't need a CW for that.

[–] Womble@piefed.world 1 points 1 week ago

You can tell when posts are from mastodon as they are full of twitterisms like hashtags and @User to reply to comments

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for posting about this thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange

I'm interested (in a tired defeatist way) in what I need to do to stay on the right side.

It sounds like geoblocking is probably the quickest legally safe course of action, so perhaps it's bye Mississippi too...

yeah it really is tiring and depressing. It isn't clear what the risks really are right now, and how that might change over time. It's also not completely clear how much geoblocking will reduce the risks' at least with the Online Safety Act, regulators said earlier this year that geoblocking is sufficient -- although of course they could change their minds at some point. Really hard to know what to do ...

[–] thebookelf@literature.cafe 9 points 2 weeks ago

Considering many countries are implementing this at the same time, I'm not sure there will be any countries left to run an instance from or set a VPN connection at.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

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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[–] Jerry@feddit.online 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

US states are turning into legal trolls - that's how you know the empire is done for.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So, if I understand the whole Bluesky thing correctly, there are apps that don't respect Bluesky's limitations (like having to log in to view certain posts).

Would those apps skip this as well or is this an actual geo-block?

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Any recommendations for a good Android app that would ignore things like this?

I'm currently using the Bluesky app because the ones I tried didn't want to auto open Bluesky links.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

not sure, sorry. i tend not to run mobile apps, so mosf of the apps I know of are web apps (deer.social, zeppelin.social, deck.blue etc). there may well be some Android apps out there though!

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[–] Kirk@startrek.website 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@Kirk It is. As their announcement says,

"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."

Of course, today 99.9%+ of the people using AT Protocol-based services are using Bluesky's app. But that was already in the process of changing, and stuff like this -- and the Online Services Act, and the (very justifiable) desire by Canadians and Europeans and everybody else not to be depending on US company's infrastructure are just giving it more momentum. So, it'll be interesting to see how it works out.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 2 weeks ago

But that was already in the process of changing

No

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