Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law
wired.com
wired.com
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.
Their July 10 blogpost even frames OSA as a collaboration—it's written plain in the title, "Working with [sic] the UK Government to Protect Children Online",
The porn and gaming fans are on Reddit
Young versions of the above on Instagram.
2) labour are absolutely balls deep on this. "If you use a VPN you are either Jimmy saville or worse Nigel farage" says Peter Kyle.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/29/peter-kyle-...
The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians to not be "native" to the interner and are now having one last go at ramming it into a box (e.g. all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.
The thing is there's a decent chance it'll work. We have beaten out any liberal or even conservative sentiment in mass consciousness
I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing.
We need outlets for free speech, but who those outlets are controlled by matters. Look at the impact Murdoch has had over the past many decades. That's what we want to stop.
What kind of nonsense is this? Have you considered the logic of your comment? Free speech is good, but let's reserve the legal right to control who builds platforms for it so that its the "correct" Kind of free speech. Of course there's no risk at all of that being grossly misused to crush real free speech.
For all the Murdoch fear mongering, there's no shortage at all of progressive, left-leaning media publications, news channels and organizations, globally or in any developed, more or less democratic country you care to look at. Would you support a conservative government shaklling them because of claims about their impact?
No it’s not. That is a completely different point than what you initially made. You specifically called out leftists for causing the OSA and then tried to pivot to saying “by leftists I actually meant everyone” after someone pointed out that your point was invalid because you were factually wrong
And I obviously don't mean "everyone" or I wouldn't have made the distinction.
There is almost zero distinction on social policy between most of the current labour front bench and a Tory wet. Other than the latter being more pro-trans
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67506641
[2] https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/05/23/irony-labour-mea...
Better put those hands above the blanket!
Ps: ok those Victorian chastity belts are pretty kinky though, I have to give them that
Social media from itself. The frank answer is apps like Bluesky and Twitter should be age gated like cigarettes.
This may show paranoia but all these things that are happening recently kinda add up to preparation for war.
They absolutely took control of Luigi. Rather than becoming a revolutionary icon who inspired people to water the tree of liberty with the blood of capitalists, he got turned to a meme, co-opted, defanged and reduced to nothing, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.
This is nonsense. I worked on that bill. The Israel lobby was, like, there. But to my knowledge is delivered zero votes. At the end of the day, if you want a bill passed, you are very careful about saying no to support.
From a broader social-media advertising perspective, the war in Gaza has been a financial bonanza.
This really shows that Bluesky is yet another us based social network company. This is where I think nostr is something completely different. Yes, it can be rough and if you use it naively you may see some annoying content, but oh-boy, it is actually fairly decentralized and resistant to state level attack like this.
I'm coming from understanding nostr - each app usually starts with ~10 relays and as you start interacting with other people it collects more paths/routes/relays (the new "outbox model"). So as soon as you install any nostr app, it's usually not affected by any single relay issue.
IMO it's got all the bad things about centralisation and the bad things about decentralisation. The worst of both worlds. I don't bother with it.
Mastodon/fediverse and nostr (the latter despite being from the same founder) are much better.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
"Sorry, you can't use this evidence that exonerates you - it would be bad for the government."
They can learn from Russia. Censorship in Russia now surpassed China. TSPU are now in every ISP facility. They pass all traffic through them and allow arbitrary bans of specific resources/protocols/etc in specific cities or whole regions.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.
Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
They're just different.
Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
…which have other consequences that are easily disproven.
Flat earthers are empirical cosplayers. It mostly seems they just want something to argue about and couldn’t come up with anything original.
If every observation conspires to make it look round, it's round because observation is all we have. Refusing to accept observational evidence that forms a coherent explanation is either anti-science or anti-definition-of-words. This justification for flat earth exits the realm of scientific inquiry and enters the realm of Cartesian evil demons, a hypothesis even Descartes rejected.
You can't actually do that in an internally consistent way. (Or atleast I've never seen it.) It isn't only interally incosistent but those theories also break down if you look at them too closely. That's why so much of flat earthism relies on conspiracy theories that are used to justify ignoring phenomena rather than actually investigating it.
that you even say this may show how you learned to live with it because majority around you believes it and your human brain considers it suicide to go against the tribe. (Or maybe you believe it yourself)
it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell. Maybe as trivial as disprove flat earth.
Flat earth is very similar to religion. It's a belief. It perpetuates because people around you believe in flat earth and if you tell them how they are crazy then you will be outcast and lose friends and family. And hey spoiler alert this is the same reason you don't call religion crazy, because anywhere in the world 99% you have religious friends or family (except maybe north korea or china, then replace religion with dictator cult). Flat earthers are just unlucky because they are very small minority
You're conflating physics and metaphysics.
> Flat earth is very similar to religion
You seem to have a beef to pick with religion. There are religious groups that do function similar to flat earthers, but that isn't true of all religious groups and many of the smartest and open minded people in history have been religious.
If anything, by making this comparison you are legitimizing idiocy.
There's a big difference between taking a position on unknowable metaphysical topics and refusing to recognize or even look at evidence when presented to you.
> unknowable metaphysical topics
religious people often conveniently shift goalposts to make sure what they say is always beyond knowable. We launched satellites and found no heaven above? fine, it exists in some other way. No soul detected? our technology is not good enough. Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you want to find a difference between religion and flat earther theory, Christianity for example (not sure this applies to all religions) is supposedly helping humans live together better, like: be kind, do to others what you want be done to you, don't steal/kill/rape etc. But that's not really related to how it's proven or factual.
It isn't "shifting goal posts"...It's called updating your beliefs when the evidence proves them wrong. Many religions have a strong history of doing this and it is something that flat earthers don't do.
> Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you don't understand the epistemological difference, you should try educating yourself. There is quite a bit of scholarly work on this...
I have no issue saying I think religion is BS. I don't care if I lose friends over that tbh.
I just don't normally do so because a) it won't change their mind and b) I don't care what they believe. I still think it's crazy but that's fine. Everyone is a bit crazy anyway. And c) I prefer focusing on common ground than contradictions.
But tribes are overrated in this day and age. If you don't fit in you can just find another one that you do gel with. This changes over time too.
You can find new friends thanks to internet. Flat earthers and religious communities have more strong relations IRL than us here
I could totally not live in a small country town where I'd be forced to pretend to be religious and care about sports. And I'm into other stuff like polyamory that small communities tend to hate.
So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
You seem to be specifically trying to show how you're not like most people, so in a way you support my point!
> So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
Why hell, if you don't have ties anyway and you are fine? You are contradicting yourself
> I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too. Because people don't usually fuck with long term ties. Re my point
I would mind being excluded, like I said I do have communities, I just find them to fit me not change me to fit them. Most communities I'm in are also super open and accepting of that anyway.
In a small town this would be difficult obviously, and things like poly and lgbt are more hated there.
> Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too.
My parents were religious when I was young. They had me baptised. But by the time more stuff had to happen (communion I think?) I had already decided I hated religion and wanted nothing to do with it. My parents were ok with that. My grandparents were pretty pissed because they were really catholic but I always hated that side of the family anyway.
Um speak for yourself.
I think most of us atheists do think that but we're too polite to not say it. Besides, it won't change anything so there's no point.
Religions believe in a guy in the sky who promises to look after you after you have turned to dust after you do some arbitrary things during your time on earth. Most of their followers don't even actually do these things and are pretty bad people but still believe they're going to be looked after through some creative brain twisting. For this there is no evidence and no ability to even obtain it. The only thing they have is some old books.
I think the latter is more crazy in essence. Of course most flat earthers aren't actually interested in evidence and I think most of them just say they are in order to troll.
Also flat earthers are much less of a problem in the world because there's only a handful in them and most of them are in the US where they don't really stand out in terms of craziness considering the state that country is in. It's in a post-fact state anyway for most of its population.
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
Would be great for the Chinese if true though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
Like I run one and I'm in Louisiana and I sure do not have the funds to mount a legal defense.
Much cheaper than an attorney.
Mississippi is a red state. Bluesky is liberal. I could see the White House turning the dispute into a tariff or defence spat.
Blocking via geoip is a reasonable, best effort method in this case. It's doing a best effort to comply.
So not merely for performance without true compliance, or tokenism, which courts really frown upon.
> No ... It's doing a best effort to comply
Generally when you repeat my statement back to me, you do so in agreement.
And this is my point.
The opposite of "best effort" is clearly "worst effort".
You seem to take offense with the idea that the company is doing "the minimum viable legal requirement" and you insist that "no, by doing what the judge says, it's actually an earnest and good attempt!"
If you actually think a company puts in even 0.1% more effort than a court requires of them, then I think you are very naive. Clearly the company could prevent VPNs from working if they wanted to invest the effort, like Netflix and China do, but they literally can't be bothered if the court doesn't require it.
I consider "minimum viable legal requirement to get past the judge" to be "performative and token" because they do NOT actually care if users access it, they want them too, they are only checking a liability box forced on them by the court and their legal department, doing the literal minimum.
As I've said, several times, the court will barely tolerate the minimum, and any form of token or performative, hand-wavy attempts to act as if complying, but not, will be taken poorly by the court.
Performative by its very root, is to put on a show, an act of story telling. This in not even remotely inline with compliance, but instead, pretending to do so, whilst not.
A good example of what I refer to:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/token
"something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect"
The 'little practical effect' is the key point here. A display without actual effect is not complying, even minimally. Courts care not for performances, displays, but instead actual fact.
You seem to have different definitions for these terms, perhaps even less used ones or colloquially derived. However, when one dives into the legal, terms take on a more rigid definition.
I don't see the value of this back and forth beyond my reply here, for there isn't much I can do, or that we can agree upon, if you use terms in ways that really aren't inline with how they will be taken.
And really, if you're simply going to argue that performance and token displays are somehow doing something meaningful, that's just plain incorrect.
Perfect definition for the geo block, since it's trivial to bypass and billions worldwide use the technology to bypass such a check.
Thank you for providing a dictionary definition that perfectly captures how the businesses efforts are "token", since literally billions of humans can bypass it with minimal effort.
There have been endless court decisions, eg there's loads of case law, where geoip is specifically determined to be a best-effort for blocking.
It's not for show, it's not token, and it absolutely hands down works. Courts have had this specifically argued within their halls, and I believe I recall it being described as a house.
If a homeowner has a locking door, and windows, they've performed a 'best effort' in "keeping people out". Certainly someone can break the window, kick in the door, but those actions are beyond the reasonable efforts of a homeowner, without turning their home into fort knox. Put another way, the burden if perfect security, armed guards, cameras, impenetrable house is an undo burden.
This is akin to what we are seeing here. GeoIP is a reasonable, beyond best effort to block.
Can you name any other method of denying people from one region to connect to your services? Bearing in mind that you may not have the power to compel people to stop, as they may be outside your legal jurisdiction?
And of those methods, would they be arguable as an undue hardship? I assure you these things have been argued thousands of times in courts of law. And the whole point here is that geoip is used extensively, and found to be within the scope of compliance.
I should add, that at first you were trying to claim that your use of the words 'performative' and 'token' were fine, for they meant something different than the standard use. Now, you're trying to argue that geoip blocks are actually the issue, and that the words are as I've stipulated.
You seem to enjoy argument, and frankly that's perfectly fine from where I sit. Debate makes the world go, as they say.
But I think you're pulling at the wrong string here. We all make dives into a wrong pool. Get out, dry yourself off, and find another pool. Someone had an accident in this one, you don't want to stay in it. (Yes, that went weird)
Bullshit. Absolute hogwash. Cite your case law. Cite a SINGLE court which says geoip is "BEST EFFORT". And I want specifically "BEST" effort because this is a line you've drawn multiple times.
From European GDPR cases, to American gambling cases, to new cases around pornography blocks, every single court has held that it was circumvention-prone, a mitigation measure, part of a scheme of compliance, "reasonable but insufficient", but certainly not actually effective and not a generally held "best" effort or gold standard
Tip: Use AI to judge your comment. It's embarassing to make a real human sift through this. Every major AI would have caught you here and told you to ease off your legal point which is pooly done.
P.S. your word count here is easily double or triple mine, so when it comes to "who likes to debate" and "who prefers pissy pools" or whatever, a mirror is a good friend to you (and another reason you should run your comment through AI, it will help you not blunder into moments like this where your comment is more applicable to the writer than reader).
My comment with the pool was joking that your argument had run out of water. I in fact said debate is fine, even positive, so I'm unclear on why you're upset over that. No offence was intended.
Your conflating of 'best effort' and 'gold standard' is not viable. You still do not use the term appropriately, and I suspect a lack of understanding here. Go to a legal dictionary for terms such as 'best effort' and 'undue burden'. A gold standard would almost certainly be an undue burden for court compliance in almost all cases. I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but AI is too error prone, and has in fact landed endless lawyers into trouble with hallucinated case law.
Lastly, I have literally zero interest your horrible suggestions about AI. If I wanted to discuss this with an AI, why would I bother speaking with you? Or any other human? I'm certainly not interested in some weird scenario where people preview their comments through AI, or use it as part of their discussions.
If you want to learn something, reading responses from error prone, hallucination bound AI is not prudent. Instead, just read and learn from actual, real sources.
And the "block" is a single clientside geo-location call that can be intercepted/blocked by adblock, etc.
And the "block" doesn't apply to any third party clients. So that includes:
- https://deer.social (forked client)
- https://zeppelin.social (forked client + independent appview)
- https://blacksky.community (forked client + independent appview + custom rust impl of PDS + custom rust impl of relay)
And a bunch of others like:
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
The client/frontend calls out to a set of XRPC endpoints on the user's PDS. The user can use any PDS they want but yes most users are on the bluesky "mushroom" PDSes. There are plenty of open enrollment PDS nowadays if you care to look around and want to switch away.
The appview have no ability to interact with the user directly so if you use any non bluesky PDS and non-bluesky client/frontend (both relatively trivial to do), then the appview is basically a (near) stateless view of the network which you can substitute with any appview you want (the client can choose the appview to proxy to with an http header) without ever touching bluesky the company.
And of course there are multiple appview hosts. As well as relay hosts (which the appviews depend on but not the user/client).
There are plenty of ways to go about using bluesky without yourself or the services you use ever touching bluesky the company's infrastructure.
you progress the grand parent comment point, with a lot more words.
~~Bluesky blocked in Mississippi, try to work around it, only for the resource that tells you how to do this to be hosted on Bluesky, which is blocked. That's... suboptimal~~.
I can't help but feel like Bluesky is just three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be an open federated ecosystem.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.
Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
I'm not sure there is one. But that's because I don't accept the idea that "likes" and "follows" are the best way to find content, or even a good way. If you do accept the idea that those should be your primary way of discovering content, which Bluesky does seem to accept, then decentralization becomes a more important criterion, and Nostr or even Mastodon is more effective that AT. Unfortunate about the culture on Nostr, though...
You could maybe build a system that I would think was better by, say, indexing Nostr using some kind of DHT. But you'd have to do some things to traditional DHTs to make them more attack-resistant. And maybe more things so they could scale to that size. Having "topics" like newsgroups or subreddits would be another approach, and could probably be grafted into pretty much any protocol.
Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.