Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws

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 nonprofit 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.

The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.)

“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.

Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon’s individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fines for noncompliance with the law.

At the time of our reporting on this exchange, Mastodon gGmbH, the community-funded nonprofit organization, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon’s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” to its services.

That is, the Mastodon software doesn’t support it. The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users’ ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored.

That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.

The nonprofit says Mastodon is currently unable to provide “direct or operational assistance” to the broader set of Mastodon server operators. Instead, it encourages owners of Mastodon and other Fediverse servers to make use of resources available online, such as the IFTAS library, which provides trust and safety support for volunteer social network moderators. The nonprofit also advises server admins to observe the laws of the jurisdictions where they are located and operate.

Mastodon notes that it’s “not tracking, or able to comment on, the policies and operations of individual servers that run Mastodon.”

“One of the reasons Mastodon was founded was to allow different jurisdictions to have social media that is independent of the U.S.,” per the statement shared with TechCrunch. “People are free to choose to have their account on a Mastodon server whose policies meet their needs.”