I do not like the approach that every app in the universe will have to comply to these new surveillance capitalism laws and create their own ID or facial verification system, but the world seems to go that way.
Operating systems have parental controls, but they are often insufficient and have too many weaknesses - I would have preferred an easier solution for parents to restrict activity for their kids on that global OS level though. Instead of forcing people to share their biometric data to companies, even if its supposed to be on-device for Discord, it isn’t for others.
When I was using Discord for gaming years ago, and they had this server search website, not sure if they still have it, there were many questionable animestyle server alike “Dating for 13+”
It must have been a paradise for pedos. So there was definitely some action needed to get rid of that. Which makes me wonder now, if these “recruiting” servers, as they are not showing age-restricted content, are they even affected by this…?
As much as I like privacy, I somewhat agree that kids do not belong on social media before 14-16. Or they need a social media just for kids. But as these scanners can get easily bypassed, it seems meaningless right now.
So all these “solutions”, that aim to protect kids, seem to have not the desired effect in the end.
As for alternatives, believe it or not I think forums are still good and more structured than an endless feed. For voice and video sharing, there are numerous alternatives.
But all the bots written for Discord, they will be hard to port to another platform. It would need something compatible. Telegram would be something like that, but I do not trust its security and Russian roots.
Some lovechild of Discord+Telegram for open source community would be huge to bring hundred thousands of people to one server. Question is how to finance, donations are rarely enough.