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 non-profit 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 p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It’s complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they’re a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you’re always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you’ll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.