I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
Thanks for the update. It really is exhausting, and depressing; you're right about Wyoming being next, and there's loads of others out there as well.
And It really is our fight to. Laws like this are part of a worldwide attack on independent social media, as well as trans and queer people, people looking for reproductive health care, youth in general, and sex workers. It's a really challenging situation.
Have you blocked the UK as well then? Same sort of thing here.
Otherwise why can't you ignore Mississippi but can ignore the UK?
On feddit.online I block both the UK and France in addition to Mississippi. However, I believe in a future upgrade, PieFed can be configured to block people from specific countries from accessing NSFW and NSFL communities (feddit.online doesn't allow NSFL communities). When that upgrade happens, I will open it again to the UK and France but keep it closed for Mississippi.
Do you live in Mississippi? Because there's no reason to capitulate otherwise unless you plan on going there on vacation (no reason to do that either).
Doesn't work that way. States agree to enforce each other's civil orders
Entirely understandable. Like you say, it's not your fight. This is more so if one creates something and isn't even from the US, if the wankers in a specific US state elect shitty government, that's not on you in a wholly different country to go up against.
This probably shouldn't be marked NSFW?
@naught101 it shouldn't, but anything posted on Mastodon with a CW is marked as NSFW on Lemmy. Similarly when the post bridged to Bluesky it got marked as "graphic media" lol. Not sure there's anything I can do about it in either case.
Oh wow, did you post this direct from mastodon just by tagging the community? Didn't realise that works, that's super cool.
Yes and these comments also show up on mastodon.
Most do but not all. And similarly most of the replies on Mastodon show up here but not all. So to follow the entire conversation you have to look in both places.
@naught101 yeah, I just tagged the lemmy community ... and yes it is super cool! although, as the NSFW highlights, somewhat clunky around the edges ... if I don't include a CW here then it figures out the title on its own, and it's not always what I want.
Usually Lemmy/PieFed use the first line of a Mastodon post as the title. You shouldn't need a CW for that.
You can tell when posts are from mastodon as they are full of twitterisms like hashtags and @User to reply to comments
Thanks for posting about this thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange
I'm interested (in a tired defeatist way) in what I need to do to stay on the right side.
It sounds like geoblocking is probably the quickest legally safe course of action, so perhaps it's bye Mississippi too...
yeah it really is tiring and depressing. It isn't clear what the risks really are right now, and how that might change over time. It's also not completely clear how much geoblocking will reduce the risks' at least with the Online Safety Act, regulators said earlier this year that geoblocking is sufficient -- although of course they could change their minds at some point. Really hard to know what to do ...
Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.
We've done it before.
Back when reddit was young, before social media apps captured the content. It just doesn't matter now. Critical mass of the internet is corporations.
No, "other sites" should disobey unjust laws
Considering many countries are implementing this at the same time, I'm not sure there will be any countries left to run an instance from or set a VPN connection at.
US states are turning into legal trolls - that's how you know the empire is done for.
So, if I understand the whole Bluesky thing correctly, there are apps that don't respect Bluesky's limitations (like having to log in to view certain posts).
Would those apps skip this as well or is this an actual geo-block?
Other apps can ignore the geoblock. From the Bluesky announcement:
This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently.
Any recommendations for a good Android app that would ignore things like this?
I'm currently using the Bluesky app because the ones I tried didn't want to auto open Bluesky links.
not sure, sorry. i tend not to run mobile apps, so mosf of the apps I know of are web apps (deer.social, zeppelin.social, deck.blue etc). there may well be some Android apps out there though!
But I thought BlueSky was open source and decentralized? /s
EDIT: In case it's not obvious (as it apparently isn't to OP) if BlueSky was either of those things then it could not be simply shut down by a CEO.
@Kirk It is. As their announcement says,
"This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently."
Of course, today 99.9%+ of the people using AT Protocol-based services are using Bluesky's app. But that was already in the process of changing, and stuff like this -- and the Online Services Act, and the (very justifiable) desire by Canadians and Europeans and everybody else not to be depending on US company's infrastructure are just giving it more momentum. So, it'll be interesting to see how it works out.
But that was already in the process of changing
That appears to be you avoiding explaining how a CEO of a for-profit company could censor an entire "decentralized" "open source" app for millions of people.
@Kirk they aren't censoring the entire network, just their official client app for it
More evasion. "Client" is Bluesky's techno jargon for "app". You still need a BlueSky account to use a client. And you can't get one of those in Mississippi.
Maybe it would help your argument that the thing BlueSky themselves says is happening is not really happening if you could produce a BlueSky post ~~that is available in~~ posted from Mississippi?
@Kirk Are you there or do you have a VPN there? I have no way of checking how things are looking from those IPs (ProtonVPN has some US addresses, but none in that state)
I am there and it's not available.
@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
"It's decentralized! It's open!" they've said. But, despite all doubts from the very beginning, Bluesky is no option for an open and decentralized web at all. There ARE reasons for protecting users under 18, but cutting a whole state off the platform is simply a certain kind of censorship.
There was hope for this service but the crypto-bro-background and the current state of the USA did a complete disservice to the platform, disqualifying it as an alternative for any federated, decentralized and free network like Mastodon and Co.!
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
#fediverse #mississippi #ageVerification
If you run any instance that is federated and has users that could sign in from that state it makes complete sense to block their IP addresses. Why on earth would someone running a Mastodon instance take on risk unlless they were in another country where there was no risk of repercussions.
If you're just hoping that small fish won't get fried that's possibly true. But admins likely won't want to find out if they will just on principles.
It‘s not only the registration, it‘s the complete usage of the service. Tricky thing.
In my eyes, this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mississippi now, what reason comes next? DJT wanting to exclude specific groups of users? Cut off whole countries? Who knows... There will be additional reasons and if you ask me, this is just the beginning with the ugly potential to turn into censorship.
Got the point, but surely they will have more legal tools than I do with my single-user Mastodon-instance - which has registrations disabled, but doesn‘t prevent any country from reaching it. 🤷🏼♂️
The way I view it is that Bluesky is a new company that is growing fast, while a site like Pornhub has been around longer and I'm sure has a large legal team that monitors laws all the time. If Pornhub said it was better to cut their losses and see if waiting out and or not seeing a good legal standing to fight with these states, Bluesky likely didn't have much of a chance.
That's easy.
Don't enter into an agreement to create an account. Accounts owned by service providers on behalf of users are a scam anyway.
Instead, let users create their own credentials and allow them to interface with a service. That makes more sense for users anyway, and it sidesteps this sort of nonsense.
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