Fediverse

And what's the problem with that?

Laws don't currently make a concession for federated social media. If the law in an instance's jurisdiction says that users on a platform must be of a certain age, then for practical/enforcement purposes it makes no difference if they're local or federated.

FWIW, I also ban people under age 18 on my instance (local and federated). Obviously I can't know everyone's age, but if someone offers it and I become aware, and it's below the minimum age set in our policy, then they're banned until they're of age - simple as that.

I'm in the US, so 13 is the minimum age by law for most services (COPPA), and there's various grumblings to increase the age specifically for social media, so I'm playing it safe with 18 which is the age you're legally considered an adult.

Considering some of the stuff that gets posted here (legitimately and via bad actors), then my legal liabilities are less as I'm going out of my way to only serve adults on the platform. Mind you, I'm running this as a hobby / volunteer and do not have a team of lawyers on hand.

Meh. At least pretending to be an adult feels like a pretty low bar.

They are, teenagers (saying this as a teenager) are hopeless. Tech became so easy to use that anything requiring a tiny bit of effort is impossible for these people.

At 14, me and most of my peers could navigate a file system on DOS, format floppies, install games from setup disks, and edit autoexec.bat files.

Yes, there is a huge difference between the teens of today and the teens of 25 years ago. Technological illiteracy is real thanks to the iPhone era and UIs becoming stupid simple to use.

The "iPad kids" meme didn't originate from thin air.

YOU GET INTO INTERNET ARGUMENTS ALL THE TIME, YOU FUNGDARK! YOU'RE IN ONE NOW!

As a teenager, I get in stupid arguments making stupid points because in my head, being right is important.

not teens, arguments (as in wasted effort to textually convince or defeat a faceless web foe) are usually stupid

Look back at the shit you wrote as a teenager. We were all dumb.

Minors are going to access the internet no matter what you do, it's on them an their underdeveloped brains on whether or not they can handle it.

If their parents don't care enough, then let them be raised here, amongst the stable minds that think anything to the left of burning kids alive for warmth is tankieism (.world) or anything to the right of luxury gay space communism is fascism (all the sane instances).

You would probably be right. Teenagers change political ideologies every other month.