In my experience most internet spaces that specifically cater to teenagers also tend to attract a lot of creeps. I think it's probably for the best to nominally limit Lemmy to adults only, especially at this early stage.
It's a regulation thing I would assume, processing under age data is heavily regulated everywhere so any social media that goes for 13+ probably has a team of lawyers.
It doesn't have to know, the processed data that is regulated is about much more than just our participation in the Fediverse. Like ip's, analytical, usage data and so on, things that are only shared between you and your lemmy instance. That's what's awesome about self hosting.
Participation could fall under the same laws as email, all the other data is yours. And as another user suggested, self hosting your instance and currating federation is probably fine. I'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice
I know that there's a teenager advice community of some flavour floating around in the Blåhaj server. But I'm gonna take a guess that the only reason it's there is because people who can't just scroll past things were downvoting it. I have a feeling that if an instance or multiple communities for teenagers popped up, the users here would probably terrorize it until it all closed down.
there is, i checked. it’s probably there either to post advice for exclusively teens or because teens posting advice were downvoted to hell because of their age