A new age assurance law in Mississippi is leading to arguments about which platforms offer the best solution for avoiding crackdowns on internet freedoms. The company behind the Bluesky social app announced it would block access to its service in the state rather than comply with the new age verification law. In a blog post, the company explained that as a small team it lacked the resources to implement the substantial technical changes required. It also raised concerns about the law’s broad scope and potential privacy implications.
The law, known as HB 1126, requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access social networks. Recently, Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect while legal challenges are heard in court. This forced Bluesky to make a decision to either comply or risk hefty fines of up to ten thousand dollars per user.
Users in Mississippi soon scrambled for a workaround, which often involves the use of VPNs. However, others questioned why a VPN would be the necessary solution, noting that decentralized social networking was meant to reduce the control and power the state or any authority would have over these platforms.
On Mastodon, the decentralized social network running the ActivityPub protocol, founder Eugen Rochko responded to the announcement from Bluesky. He stated that this situation is why real decentralization matters, and that there is nobody who can decide for the entire fediverse to block Mississippi.
This prompted a response from Techdirt founder and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick, who said Rochko’s statement was potentially misleading. Masnick pointed out that others can host their own views of the network, but also questioned whether the largest Mastodon instances would be willing to pay the fines in Mississippi, as the state could still go after individual servers. TechCrunch reached out to Mastodon to confirm whether it would comply with the law on its main instance but did not receive a response by the time of publication. The law was written in a way that a Mastodon instance could become a target, as could a message board, chat room, landing page, video channel, or main feed.
Rochko and Masnick then engaged in a debate. Rochko accused Bluesky of having all its infrastructure run by one U.S. company. He also noted it was interesting that this was the only time someone from Bluesky had suggested working together to fight such legislation since its launch nearly two years ago.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Unlike Mastodon, which connects thousands of decentralized servers over the ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky uses a different protocol called the AT Protocol, which focuses more on account portability and decentralized moderation. Bluesky allows people to run their own versions of the components that make up its social networking infrastructure, such as personal data servers, relays, and moderation lists.
However, Bluesky is still the largest entity to operate a personal data server, as the network is fairly new. This means the majority of Bluesky’s users rely on its own infrastructure. Progress is being made, as communities like Blacksky have recently spun up their own personal data servers, and there are other independently run relays and app views.
In the meantime, these platform disputes do not help the users in Mississippi who have been locked out of their preferred social networks. Without using a VPN, some users in the state report they have been able to access Bluesky through third-party clients like Graysky, Skeets, Klearsky, Tokimeki, Flashes, or forked versions of the Bluesky app like Deer.social or Zeppelin.
Rudy Fraser, the founder of Blacksky, confirmed that his community does not plan on blocking any users based on their location anywhere in the world. There is also a sideloaded version of Bluesky available through the alternative app distribution platform AltStore. For those in Mississippi in need of a read-only version of Bluesky, the Anartia search engine is available.
These workarounds are not necessarily permanent solutions. The makers of these apps and clients must decide for themselves whether they want to risk becoming a popular alternative for users in Mississippi that could attract the attention of legislators. The law broadly affects services that allow users to create profiles, post content, and interact with others on a social networking service, which is a very broad definition.
If Bluesky client applications do not run their own personal data servers to host user data, they may be considered as only offering clients and therefore should not be affected. However, explaining the intricacies of how a personal data server works to a judge might prove difficult.
Mississippi is not the only state looking to add an age assurance layer to the internet. Other laws are in various stages in Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Virginia. The Virginia law is particularly challenging as it includes a time limit for usage of social media sites.
The diaspora of social networking alternatives at least makes enforcement of this type of legislation more difficult compared with a traditionally centralized network like Facebook or Instagram. That is a step in the right direction for decentralization, regardless of your network of choice. However, overly broad laws also advantage larger centralized platforms, which easily have the resources to comply, while smaller services like Bluesky simply have to opt out.