Mastodon’s nonprofit operator has told server administrators it lacks the practical ability to comply with a Mississippi statute that requires online platforms to verify users’ ages, citing the network’s decentralized architecture and its design not to collect identifying data.
In public exchanges this week, Mastodon’s founder argued that there is no central authority able to direct the entire Fediverse to block access to a single state. That position was met with questions from others in the social media space about how liability under the law might apply to individual server operators.
Mastodon’s software team acknowledged that the platform does not track users in ways that would make statewide enforcement straightforward. The organization also said it is reluctant to recommend IP-based blocking as a workaround because such measures can sweep up legitimate users who are simply traveling across state lines.
The project’s recent release introduced an option for server administrators to require a minimum age at sign-up, but that feature does not retain verification data. As a result, responsibility for implementing any verification process falls to the operators of individual instances, the nonprofit said.
Mastodon gGmbH said it cannot provide operational support to the wider community of server hosts and urged administrators to consult available trust-and-safety resources and to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where they operate. The organization added it does not monitor or manage the policies of independently run servers.
Advocates of the state law have framed it as a measure to protect minors, while critics warn that enforcement mechanisms could be difficult to apply to federated networks and could expose individual hosts to steep penalties. The statute includes provisions for significant fines for noncompliance, a point that has driven debate about whether decentralized platforms can practically conform to such rules.
The discussion follows responses from other social platforms that have taken varying approaches to the law, including restricting or withdrawing services in the state. Mastodon’s statement underscores the technical and policy challenges that distributed networks face when state-level regulations require centralized control or persistent identity verification.
