The decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with Mississippi’s age verification laws – the same law that rival Bruski was drawn from the state – because it has no means of doing so.
Social nonprofits explain that Mastodon doesn’t track users, making it difficult to enforce such laws. Also, I don’t want to use IP address-based blocking. Because it unfairly affects people traveling.
The statement follows a lively exchange conversation between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick earlier this week. In a conversation published on each social network, Rochico claimed that “no one can decide on a fediverse to block Mississippi.” (Fediverse is a decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is equipped with the ActivityPub protocol.)
“And this is why true decentralization is important,” Rochiko said.
Masnick questioned why individual Mastodon servers are not subject to the same $10,000 per user fine for violating the law, as Mastodon individual servers run on Mastodon.social.
At the time of reporting on the exchange, Mastodon GGMBH, a community-funded nonprofit organization, did not respond to a request for comment.
However, on Friday, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that Mastodon’s own server has signed up for the service with a minimum age of 16, but has no “there is a way to apply age verification.”
In other words, the Mastodon software does not support it. The July 2025 Mastodon 4.4 release added the ability to specify the minimum age of sign-up and other legal functions to handle terms and conditions in response to increased regulations in these areas. This new feature allows server administrators to check the user’s age while signing up, but no age check data is saved.
This means that individual server owners must decide for themselves whether they consider the age verification component to be a necessary addition.
According to the nonprofit, Mastodon currently cannot provide “direct or operational support” to the broader set of Mastodon server operators. Instead, we encourage Mastodon and other Fediverse server owners to take advantage of resources available online, such as the IFTAS library, which provides trust and safety support to volunteer social network moderators. Nonprofits also advise server administrators to comply with the laws of the jurisdiction in which they exist and operate.
Mastodon says that “we don’t track or comment on the policies and operations of the individual servers running Mastodon.”
“One reason why Mastodon was founded was to allow various jurisdictions to have social media independent of the United States, according to a statement shared with TechCrunch.” “People are free to have an account on a mastodon server where the policy meets their needs.”
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