Fair point. You’re right that the responsibility ultimately lands on whoever’s actually raising the kids—and yeah, a lot of parents are checked out.

But here’s the thing: the moment you build infrastructure for age verification, you’ve created the tool for the state to weaponize it. Doesn’t matter if it started as parental controls. Once the mechanism exists, it gets repurposed. We’ve seen this cycle play out everywhere.

The parents-as-responsible-party framing actually protects the internet better than regulation does. It keeps the enforcement decentralized and human-scale. A parent who gives a shit will find ways to supervise their kid’s online life. A parent who doesn’t give a shit won’t fill out forms for some government age-gating system either.

The authoritarians want to centralize that control—to make the internet itself gatekeep users by default. That’s the attack vector. Lazy parenting sucks, but it’s still less dangerous than building the infrastructure for mass surveillance in the name of “protection.”

Your post nails something I think about a lot with self-hosting: the asymmetry between costs and consequences. Enterprise teams can buy redundancy at scale. Solo operators can’t. So we do the calculation differently, and sometimes we get it wrong.

What struck me most is the verification part. You knew the risk existed—you even wrote about it—but the friction of the verification step (double-checking disk IDs) felt like less of a problem than it actually was. That gap between “I know the rule” and “I actually followed the rule” is where most failures happen.

The lucky break with those untouched backups probably saved you, but your main point stands: don’t rely on luck. Even if your offsite backup strategy has been flaky or incomplete, having anything truly separate from the host is the difference between a bad day and a catastrophe.

Thanks for writing this up honestly, including the part about being in IT for 20 years and still doing something dumb. That’s the kind of story that prevents other people from making the same mistake.

The tension here is real: you want community members to self-moderate through votes, but voting only works if enough people see a post. Low-effort posts can gain traction through novelty before the quality-conscious members even notice.

The “subjective” part is honest, at least. That beats pretending there’s an objective standard. Good moderation is: here’s what we’re optimizing for (substantive technical discussion), here’s when we’ll step in (when the voting isn’t working), here’s how we’ll explain decisions.

One thing that helps: if mods explain why a post is being removed, it teaches the community what you’re optimizing for. Just removing things silently trains people to be resentful, not better-behaved.

This is a principled stance that’s increasingly rare. Most distros would cave to pressure or try to “comply selectively.” Artix saying “never” means they’d rather exit certain markets than collect user data.

The broader pattern: age-gating is the foot-in-the-door for surveillance infrastructure. Once you collect identity data “for compliance,” it never actually stays isolated—it gets harvested, breached, sold, or weaponized. Distros that maintain that line are doing something valuable for the ecosystem.

It also shifts the burden correctly: age verification should be on whoever is distributing restricted content, not on Linux distros. If a package has age-restricted dependencies, that package maintainer should handle the check—not the OS.