Blue In Mississippi

When I first got on the internet in the mid-’90s, much of my interest in tech was driven by the access to resources I did not immediately have access to through traditional means.

One of the first ways I used the internet was by dialing up a Free-Net line, getting in the Lynx browser, and seeing how far I could get. Often, the sysop kicked me off within about five minutes, but sometimes I managed to get pretty far.

As I could not type in any web addresses myself, my goal was to keep clicking until I found something that looked like the “real” internet. Sometimes, I got lucky.

I was 13. It changed my life.

But a new law recently passed in Mississippi, like that passed in the U.K., wants to limit who can access the social media platforms to those willing to share their identity, and the cited reason for doing so is kids. (The law was named for a teen who committed suicide as the result of a catfishing incident, and passed with bipartisan support. A small tug at heartstrings can do a lot of damage.)

With a court ruling letting the law go through for now, despite the fact that it is likely to fail on First Amendment grounds in a higher court, Bluesky has decided not to test the legal system.

On Friday, it announced that it would no longer operate in the state—creating the perfect example of a patchwork of laws that many worry about. In a blog post announcing the move:

Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring—costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers. This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.

We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.

Worst of all, users now get a message then they have a Mississippi IP and try to load Bluesky.

The message might look strangely familiar to anyone who lives in a state where certain adult content providers have left. And yes, it is very likely that people will use the same methods that those users rely on to access those adult sites. VPNs blew up in popularity in the U.K. recently as a result of its Online Safety Act.

The Bluesky blog noted that the Mississippi law is even more extreme than the Online Safety Act, if that is even possible:

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.

At least one publication in the state, the Mississippi Free Press, has a very large platform on Bluesky, and they may be at risk of losing that megaphone, which puts a focus on the issues facing their state.

“As a nonprofit publication, we do not take positions on specific legislation or laws,” editor Ashton Pittman wrote. “But whatever the Mississippi Legislature’s intent, we now find ourselves in a place where we are now having to grapple with how to ensure we can stay connected with all of our readers, many of whom follow us on Bluesky.”

The internet will grow around the law, like it always does

I have a feeling that what may happen as a result of all of this is that we will gradually begin to decentralize more. Part of the reason big platforms full of user-generated content are targets is because they create a fulcrum that lawmakers can target.

They have figured out that putting a lean on a few key issues will make it easier to restrict information online, because they are hard to compete against in the court of public opinion.

The good news is that, like the fediverse, Bluesky has stronger underpinnings than your average social network. You don’t have to use the Bluesky client. Nor do you have to live on the Bluesky network to communicate with the AT Protocol. External clients could help in a big way.

I asked Anuj Ahooja, the CEO and executive director of A New Social, a nonprofit working to build distributed social technology that works across protocols, what he thought of this situation. He says this moment could be an opportunity to “to decouple peoples’ networks from platforms.”

“When platforms make decisions that have an impact on peoples’ livelihood, whether forced or not, people should be able to escape without having to leave their communities behind,” he says.

On top of the nonprofit’s stewardship of the popular Bridgy Fed tool, the organization is in the midst of launching its Bounce tool, which makes it possible to migrate social graphs between Mastodon and Bluesky. For media outlets at risk of getting disconnected from an important platform, for example, this could be a powerful tool.

“The combination of Bridgy Fed and Bounce gives them an exit strategy that lets them preserve their existing communities and relationships,” he adds.

You do not have to use Bluesky to talk to Bluesky, and in a moment like this, that’s a superpower. You can use external clients. You can host your server somewhere other than the Bluesky network. An escape hatch is possible—and companies like Blacksky are already cropping up to help make this hatch a reality.

Other social networks need to take notes, as they will need technical infrastructure to survive this moment. Even if the bug in Mississippi gets squashed, someone else will make another one. We need to be prepared for any situation as it arises.

In an age of platforms, we have constantly let the desire to make money and get reach take a backseat to actually owning our infrastructure. It’s moments like this that offer excellent reminders why that matters.

As I wrote last year, the real opportunity for Bluesky was not in the social network but the opportunities it opened up for tools to be built on this protocol. If played correctly, this could be the moment where those opportunities flourish.

But I have to admit: I worry about the 13-year-old, still trying to figure out who they are, getting online and having a huge section of the digital discourse blocked off to them. That makes it harder to figure out who they really are or what they care about.

I don’t want to sound like too much of a downer here but we need to be realistic. The internet as we know it is at risk, and just as fundamental protocols enabled it, fundamental protocols will save it.

Maybe those 13-year-olds will get clever like I did and accidentally find a way to reach the good parts of the internet. Laws like the ones in Mississippi tend to forgot that those exist.