BlueSky blocked Mississippi because #HB1126 would force them to age-gate everyone.
Why should fediverse instances escape that same fate? Decentralization isn’t immunity.
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@dansup If your instance is small, then probably Mississippi won't bother coming after you; if your instance is outside the US, then probably there's not much that Mississippi can do, even if you do violate their laws.
But if I were running a large instance, I'd be thinking about this carefully, e.g. https://cosocial.ca/@mpjgregoire/115079153976407709
@dansup it isn't about any one website being able to block visitors from mississippi. it's about mississippi being unable to block every single noncompliant website for their citizens. there's no reason to comply in advance, because they can't retaliate meaningfully unless there are centralized chokepoints.
@laurenshof @dansup they can at most go after specific domains. you can just ignore mississippi entirely and people in mississippi will probably still be able to access the web if they really want to -- this only affects large well-known services to the extent that they can be fined (which they don't have to pay) or censored (which can be bypassed by proxy or vpn -- and every fedi server that maintains its own cache is essentially a proxy)
@laurenshof @trwnh @dansup who up clienting their server? this is seriously what AP client to server and verifiable credentials were made for, so that each server and each instance didn't have to separately implement age checks for each jurisdiction on earth 1 by 1 (or N by N as we say in standardsland)
@by_caballero @laurenshof @dansup you can also just *not* verify people's age. you can fight these laws just like the SOPA/PIPA blackouts in 2012. i don't see why anyone should just roll over and accept the dystopia without a struggle
@dansup spread around the world and a large number of them means it is very unlikely this kind of thing will make people from Mississippi lose access even if some decide to block.
@dansup
Like so many laws, unless and until someone complains, they won't suffer the same fate.
Like so many laws, unless and until someone complains, they won't suffer the same fate.
But does the law have some sort of scale threshold? Probably not, but I know some European laws only apply to large companies.
@dansup it is if you have very few users
this really affects those large enough to care about legal incoming
@dansup
How do they enforce this if you are outside of Mississippi or outside the US?
Our instance is hosted in Japan, registered to a non-US citizen. In what possible way could they enforce this?
The lesson seems to be not that you should block Mississippi but that you shouldn’t host your site in the US
@dansup I’m definitely considering blocking multiple jurisdictions now. We’re less safe if anything.
@dansup I have been waiting for this.
@dansup I've been thinking this too, ever since the announcement.
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