> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.

This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.

It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.

That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.

That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.