"Why do you need age verification on a site where everyone is 38?"
idk who on earth could possibly need to hear this, but do NOT, under ANY circumstances, give out your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER to ANY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
☝️☝️☝️
worth noting that the atproto architecture makes age verification a lot easier to bypass than other platforms. though, you would have hoped to have a few more years before taking advantage of these features lol. but from a country that is unfortunately a couple years into this shit already, I recommend...
switch your PDS (thing that stores your data) from bluesky.social. some existing public PDSes include Blacksky and Eurosky. eurosky has a simple tool, linked, which makes transferring your data from another PDS very easy. (if you are more technical, you can also self-host a PDS on your own server, the way you would a website.)
then, switch your frontend (the thing that lets you read and write posts) away from bsky.app to one of the forks; I recently switched to using Witchsky, which is actively maintained at time of writing. this gives you a pretty much identical experience with a few extra features, notably including bypassing age verification nonsense for DMs in countries like the UK, and some of the bullshit moderation bsky has been imposing lately. (it also lets you change the colours).
to be clear, this mostly lets you see stuff that gets censored; it won't help your posts get seen if you're blocked and most of the users are still on bsky.app, but it's a good thing to do now before you have to, and you don't need to convince everyone to come along right away the way you would something like discord.
it's going to take a while to get bsky as decentralised in practice as something like fedi, but the way they're running it, we had better pull the trigger on that 'if you don't like it you can switch and take your data with you' promise asap
