Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws | TechCrunch
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Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.

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 non-profit 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.

  • hisao@ani.socialEnglish
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    22 hours ago
    • Tor is optimized for accessing the regular internet anonymously. It uses onion routing with a small number of long-lived relays, and you exit back to the clearnet through an exit node. Hidden services (now called onion services) exist, but they’re secondary to Tor’s main use case.
    • I2P is designed primarily for internal services (called eepsites, torrents, chat, etc.) inside the I2P network itself. It doesn’t rely on exits the way Tor does. It uses garlic routing (a variant of onion routing with bundled messages), and every participant is both a client and a router, making it more peer-to-peer.