I'm so tired of this civility meta.
Lemmy is half as uncivilized as any other social media space I've ever been in, including reddit or Twitter. I think people are just confused by a lack of centralized authority to settle disputes on what is or isn't 'civil' behavior - but it certainly isn't the case that it's any less civil than just about any alternative.
Maybe this places extra stress on instance admins for constantly addressing complaints of users on and off their server, but that has less to do with the kind of user civility people are talking about and more with a culture of mob justice evidenced by communities like MoG and PTB.
People seem uncomfortable with multipolar systems, and maybe it's because of my political bent but I think distributed systems are way better.
Yea, that's the thing - I don't think it would 'do' it for legislators. Like you mentioned - it's not really about protecting children, but also the only way to enforce a law like this would be to log or register devices to specific people or children. This would essentially just shift the point of verification from the individual website to the point of sale of the phone or tablet. Verifying the age is the part that necessitates identification - the only thing a hardware-locked strategy does is centralizes that verification to a governing body instead of individual websites, but it still associates individuals with specific devices.
I get why this might seem preferable, but the problem of online privacy still persists.