Decentralized social media Mastodon states it can’t abide by Mississippi’s age verification law — the same regulation that saw competing Bluesky take out of the state — due to the fact that it does not have the ways to do so.
The social charitable clarifies that Mastodon doesn’t track its customers, that makes it tough to apply such regulations. Nor does it intend to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unjustly impact people who were traveling, it states.
The declaration follows a vibrant back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and chief executive officer Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board participant and journalist Mike Masnick. In the discussion, published on their corresponding socials media, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can make a decision for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that consists of Mastodon and various other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub method.)
“And this is why actual decentralization issues,” claimed Rochko.
Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon’s individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would certainly not also undergo the same $ 10, 000 per individual fines for noncompliance with the regulation.
At the time of our reporting on this exchange, Mastodon gGmbH, the community-funded non-profit company, really did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, however, the charitable shared a declaration with TechCrunch to clarify its setting, saying that while Mastodon’s own web servers specify a minimal age of 16 to register for its solutions, it does not “have the ways to apply age confirmation” to its solutions.
That is, the Mastodon software program doesn’t support it. The Mastodon 4 4 launch in July 2025 included the capacity to specify a minimal age for sign-up and various other lawful features for dealing with terms of service, partially in feedback to raised guideline around these areas. The brand-new function enables web server administrators to check individuals’ ages throughout sign-up, but the age check information is not stored.
That suggests individual server proprietors have to choose on their own if they think an age confirmation element is an essential addition.
The charitable states Mastodon is presently unable to give “direct or functional support” to the more comprehensive collection of Mastodon web server drivers. Rather, it urges owners of Mastodon and various other Fediverse servers to use sources offered online, such as the IFTAS collection, which offers depend on and safety assistance for volunteer social network mediators. The charitable likewise suggests server admins to observe the legislations of the territories where they are located and run.
Mastodon keeps in mind that it’s “not tracking, or able to discuss, the plans and operations of individual web servers that run Mastodon.”
“Among the factors Mastodon was established was to enable various territories to have social networks that is independent of the united state,” per the declaration shown to TechCrunch. “Individuals are complimentary to pick to have their account on a Mastodon server whose plans fulfill their needs.”