

Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn’t send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they’re not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.
It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/17/hundreds-of-websites-to-shut-down-under-chilling-internet/ Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up…
This article is interesting as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just-banning-minors-social-media-not-protecting-them My favorite quote is this one, “All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. […] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation.”
This is why lemmy is great. At least for now, most instances aren’t run for-profit and it shows.