and you know what? if you asked 100 people off the street if we should check people's ages before letting them on the internet, I reckon 90 would say that is a good idea. If it was done via ISO 27566 and some sort of digital token so you don't have to send a scan of physical ID or use a 3rd party processor, it would have popular acceptance in the wider community.
The overlaying of "real world" systems on the internet is inevitable imho. The decade or two we had of relative anonymity and freedom online is going away as there's just too many normies online now, they want this, they expect the same types of frameworks that exist in meatspace to be applied on the internet too. We thought the internet would change the world but the world changed the internet.
My only silver lining thought is that maybe it’ll create an underground internet that the normies ignore/turn a blind eye to. Kinda like how Usenet piracy is still huge and massive and somehow goes about unchecked but IPTV set-top box piracy lands people in jail. Kinda like the "dark web" but, not with the implicit purpose of crime.
The other grumpy nerds and weirdos that inhabited the internet since our youth (and hopefully younger people that know the mainstream internet isn't for them and want to find their people) will disown the legacy internet and this network of freaks and geeks is where we hang out and collaborate instead, using the mainstream internet for our dayjob/government/"real world" tasks.
@decryption https://yggdrasilnetwork.org/ seems like what you want. I've been meaning to set it up one of these days.
Currently, I use I2P and Tor and try to avoid all the crime and wrongdoing
