There’s a lot of discussion of Mississippi’s age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they’re blocking the state.
Note that Mississippi’s requirements go far beyond the Online Safety Act, MIssissippi’s law, HB 1126, requires age verification for all users, and parental consent for users under 18., no matter what the content of the site is. Last week the US Supreme Court declined to block the law while it’s being challenged in the courts, even though Kavanaugh described it as “likely unconstitutional”.
The law clearly should be found unconstitutional - the amicus brief from @CenDemTech, @eff et al discusses why. Still, with the current Supreme Court, who knows; they just the (somewhat narrower) Texas age verification law also should have been found unconstitutional, but SCOTUS said it was okay. So who knows. And of course this is exactly the kind of chilling effect they’re aiming for, which is why it’s so disappointing that SCOTUS didn’t block its enforcement until the case is heard.
As far as I know there isn’t any guidance yet for people running fedi instances (or message boards, which are also covered). If you’re running a US-based fedi instance, it’s might well be worth talking to your lawyer about this. Here’s the legislation, and here’s the langauge from Section 4 (1)
“A digital service provider may not enter into an agreement with a person to create an account with a digital service unless the person has registered the person’s age with the digital service provider. A digital service provider shall make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of the person creating an account with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the information management practices of the digital service provider.”
But you are evading. The technicalities you speak of are irrelevant to the topic of censorship. The fact that parts of BlueSky are technically open source, or that other BlueSky apps exist is irrelevant to the people who are functionally denied access to speak due to the decision of a single company. There is no other “instance” we can go sign up on like with ActivityPub apps.
(Here is the part where you say I could technically get all my friends to self-host their own PDS as though it is easy and fun).
@Kirk sorry, I think I confused two threads, I need to see on the computer what I wrote to whom…
deleted by creator
@Kirk There generally aren’t open signup PDSes yet, because nobody has stepped up yet to run one, because you can easily get all kinds of spammers and bad people signing up on it and then they’re your problem… There is e.g. Blacksky PDS for black people and Turtle Island PDS for Native American people, but I don’t know if you qualify. And there are few others where you can sign up/migrate to by asking the author, but you generally need to be on Bluesky first to do that.
@Kirk The Tangled ATProto app (GitHub alternative) now allows signups on their PDS, so you should be able to sign up here: https://tangled.sh/signup, and then you have an ATProto account that you can use to log in to Bluesky using e.g. the deer.social client. And then you’re in and you can read entire Bluesky and post to it.