First of all, I don’t mean this post as a complaint, maybe more of a warning?
There is teenagers on the fediverse. Most of them don’t share their age, for hopefully obvious reasons. I’d say that a lot of the accounts which do a lot of posting/commenting are run by teenagers — because most adults probably wouldn’t have the time for that much posting.
While the young people of this generation are generally useless when it comes to something more complicated than microsoft word, the people who are good at technology, usually are very good at it.
most of my friends (most of which don’t know the difference between a laptop and a desktop) could understand the fediverse as a concept perfectly when I explained it to them irl.
So, if you’re in a really stupid argument with someone, try to remember that there is a small chance they are 14.
A parent can flag an account of their children, that the child has to accept. They would of course do this together sitting next to each other, so the child has no choice but to accept. Then, the parent can control the content the child sees.
Honestly age verification other than ID checks will never work. But to send your ID to the owner of an instance is of a whole other level, that the people who join / have joined and even the instance owners are probably unwilling to accept. And they wouln’t be wrong for that.