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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[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 86 points 1 month ago (37 children)

Arguably though, at some point they'll just say "if we can't read your traffic, you can't use the Internet."

Which still isn't a problem, as I'm sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it's going to take a while.

[–] einlander@lemmy.world 65 points 1 month ago (35 children)

At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 17 points 1 month ago (6 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?

[–] turmoil@feddit.org 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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