I’m not sure why .world has the 18 age requirement - AFAIK GDPR only requires 16+ if you don’t specifically ask for parental consent. Of course, there is the matter of pornography etc, but for example Reddit allows 13+ users, and all they do for pornography is show an NSFW warning, which Lemmy also has (although this is a good point - maybe the NSFW toggle should be improved to explicitly ask users to confirm their age on Lemmy as well, similarly to how it works on Reddit).

But at the end of the day, each instance is free to create whatever rules and processes they want, and to ban people according to those rules. I would say that .world admins are probably just trying to do their best in enforcing their rules, and unfortunately that means that most likely you’ll be cut off from .world for the next 5 months 🫤