> You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and enforcement impossibility.

I'm very much sympathetic to the post's argument, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of claim has an implicit "(for now)" at the end.

The legal system doesn't have good mechanisms for dealing with problems that it hasn't needed to deal with yet, but if most people moved to encrypted & decentralized protocols for communication, it doesn't follow that laws couldn't be amended to give governments powers to legislate or police it at scale if deemed necessary by some sufficiently powerful group (an autocracy, a voting bloc, a national security service, etc)

So I guess the other implicit piece is that one hopes the technological change comes with cultural change to our political expectations - once people get used to privacy and autonomy, they resist efforts to erode those rights again.

Best of luck to everyone advocating for this! Really hoping to see a lot of thriving communities post-Discord in the coming years.