Mastodon Says It Doesn't 'Have the Means' To Comply With Age Verification Laws

Mastodon says it cannot comply with Mississippi's new age verification law because its decentralized software does not support age checks and the nonprofit lacks resources to enforce them. 'The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn't track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation,' reports TechCrunch. 'Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.' From the report: 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.

Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon's individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fines for noncompliance with the law. On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon's own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not 'have the means to apply age verification' to its services. That is, the Mastodon software doesn't support it. The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users' ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored. That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.

The nonprofit says Mastodon is currently unable to provide 'direct or operational assistance' to the broader set of Mastodon server operators. Instead, it encourages owners of Mastodon and other Fediverse servers to make use of resources available online, such as the IFTAS library, which provides trust and safety support for volunteer social network moderators. The nonprofit also advises server admins to observe the laws of the jurisdictions where they are located and operate. Mastodon notes that it's 'not tracking, or able to comment on, the policies and operations of individual servers that run Mastodon.' Bluesky echoed those comments in a blog post last Friday, saying the company doesn't have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.