Mastodon Isn’t Complying With Age Verification Because It Can’t

While other services are bending at the knee over age verification, Mastodon has no actual means to comply.

Age verification is ushering in a whole new era of government surveillance and censorship. This is being made possible by spineless platforms and services who decided to simply bend at the knee and throw their users under the bus. Examples include Discord, Reddit, Spotify, Rockstar, and Nexus Mods.

Bluesky is someone complicated because, at first, they threw their users under the bus over the UK age verification laws, but when Mississippi came knocking and demanded more, the platform opted to block Mississippi instead of surrendering their users personal information to them.

A few have opted to resist these laws. Wikipedia, for their part, issued a legal challenge against the age verification laws in the UK, but lost in court with a ruling that would merely allow them to challenge whatever classification Ofcom comes up with.

4Chan was another website that is resisting these laws, but are seemingly taking the approach of resisting these laws from a jurisdiction perspective. The UK demanded that the US based site pay daily fines for non-compliance, but the owner, through their lawyers, said that they don’t operate in the UK and are not subject to those laws. As a result, they have no intention of paying those fines. In fact, the site, along with troll site, Kiwi Farms, filed a lawsuit in the US saying that the UK is harassing them in making these legal demands when the have no jurisdiction.

Another interesting platform in all of this is, of course, Mastodon. Unlike Bluesky, Mastodon is actually decentralized. There is no one person that can make a decision on how the whole platform operates (which is what is happening on Bluesky right now). Servers are independently operated and run and spread throughout the world. So, first of all, who does the government sue when they believe there is non-compliance? Personally, the answer to that is the server owners who operate the servers within the jurisdiction in question. While they may be shut down, it is also easy to fire up a server in a different jurisdiction to evade the government censors.

This is all by design. Mastodon is designed, among other things, to be resistant to government censorship. Nothing is stopping an individual user from creating a Mastodon server and simply accessing the network of users. At best, government has an endless game of whack-a-mole ahead of them with the platform simply remaining online.

Media outlet, TechCrunch, decided to ask around to see how Mastodon intends on complying with the various age verification laws out there. The response? It can’t. From TechCrunch:

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 nonprofit 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.

The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.)

“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.

For servers operating in the US, the hope is that law enforcement won’t come after them because of their size. If they do and order the server shut down, users can simply back up their account and hop to another server. This means that the users can simply continue to enjoy the platform long after the server they were on is shut down.

For those who know their file-sharing history, this is similar to the cases with BitTorrent trackers and eDonkey2000 servers. Law enforcement have repeatedly gone after various BitTorrent trackers, both private and public. Many have been shut down over the years such as SuprNova, Oink.cd, and others. The thing is, users simply hopped onto other trackers and continued. This is thanks to the decentralized nature of the networks. Alternatives pop up as soon as a tracker is shut down and the networks carry on.

Arguably, the Mastodon example more closely follows what happened with eDonkey2000 servers, though. eDonkey2000 servers, unlike BitTorrent trackers, connect with each other and what files were made available on one server could be accessed from another server. This is similar to Mastodon where what one user posts on one server can be seen and interacted with on another server. Much like BitTorrent, law enforcement has gone after eDonkey2000 servers and shut down a number of them. An example is Razorback. Even after those servers got shut down, others popped up and the network carried on as per normal.

The potential here is that the Mastodon network could follow along a very similar path if government comes knocking. This sets up the very scenario that I predicted last year where speech is becoming the new piracy. Government is going after speech it can’t control and networks like Mastodon are there to defend their users against the government thought police. As long as there are those who are willing to fight against the government, then there will always be a certain amount of resistance towards the government. I strongly suspect that there will be those who are more than happy to carry on that fight.

Obviously, we are not quite there yet. The government thought police has yet to go after the network in question that I know of, but it is entirely possible that we’ll eventually see a confrontation between the decentralized network and the government at some point in the future. Then the resolve of the ActivityPub network will be tested for real.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.