yes, everyone should quit proprietary and centralized platforms. everyone should move to free and open ones. especially ones around an open standard

the way forward is always going to be open standards (xmpp, matrix, chatmail/deltachat, polyproto, ...)

but this won't fix age verification, unfortunately. for that we need sustained political pressure. contact your representatives, tell everyone you know about it, educate people, organize, do not comply, be loud
@lumi this is not a real solution but for tech people that can host their and their friend’s instances it does go around much of the age verification because whatever the flag would need to be selected to make an account “adult” would be easy to make true if you own the infra
@lumi also id much rather show my id irl to a close friend than anything else if they care to ask for it
@nu this is definitely true. i also think that you knowing someone would be enough verification for their age