Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
rollin@piefed.social 12 hours agothis is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.
You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
But can they only access each other in their own “web?” Can they access the World-Wide Web on their private web? Or does that just expose them to all the other stuff anyway?
rollin@piefed.social 12 hours ago
You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.