@Gargron started chatting through ICQ with someone on the other side of the world 25 years ago. Moved on to voice (and occasional video) calls on NetMeeting shortly after. Progressed onto Skype after we arranged to meet up in IRL. Now been married 20 years.

Which is to say - our lives would have been totally different if either of us had to ID ourselves on any of those platforms in the beginning... The whole theme back then was the wild west - in fact our first conversation was about if we were talking to scammers or chatbots - ha ha ha!

So not only are we denying kids the freedom to find people and make friends, I'm pretty certain our younger selves would never have enjoyed that freedom either. Back then we enjoyed discovery through anonymous contact and neither of us would have registered with the Stasi at any stage. (And still won't! As internet old-timers we still use pseudonyms with no personal data as far as possible...)