So Discord is potentially going to require all or at least most users to confirm their ID next month. If you don’t I believe you’re under 16 from their perspective.
This made me scramble a bit for the old IRCd (although I went for Ergo eventually which is modern and written in Go), but even with that setup (I can share a link if you like?) I’m wondering if the Online Safety Act, which still applies even to that community, is basically going to crush small communities?
How are you guys thinking about coping with OSA on this forum? Sadly I believe even this place applies (it’s about the content that could be delivered to minors, not the technical means by which it’s delivered I think)
Thanks @mcrilly, I don’t think we have considered this since we originally setup 18 months ago so I asked perplexity.
It seems that we and you are both social medium platforms under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) scheme:-
A sole or significant purpose is online social interaction between users.
Users can connect or interact with other users.
Users can post material on the service.
As an open platform anybody can read the material posted here, except for our users only category, Only Fans, which is restricted to registered users.
To sign up you have to agree to our Terms of Service. This previously stated that you were 13 years of age or older but I have changed that today to 16.
So we are now compliant but all this does make it difficult to foster teenagers’ interest in the computer sciences, I sympathise with your difficulties in this endeavour.
Thank you for the nudge to delete my (long idle) Discord account!
I was wondering the same about the HLB Discourse instance in the lead up to the implementation a few months ago, and it’s a great bit of discussion. I’m not a lawyer so will leave my own opinion out of the following:
Section 5 Classes of services that are not age‑restricted social media platforms
(1) For the purposes of paragraph 63C(6)(b) of the Act, electronic services in each of the following classes are specified:
… (c) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to share information (such as reviews, technical support or advice) about products or services;
Jumping into the Explanatory statement for the above rules, page 10 (Paragraph (c)) discusses the intent of the rules further. I won’t reproduce it here in full (It’s a couple of paragraphs in the PDF).
This is my understanding of OCAU’s official position, and I recall something similar being discussed over on Whirlpool at the time (although I can’t find the reference now).
And finally, this section of the eSafety FAQs specifically discusses “reasonable steps” for small online services.
This came up today. I’ve been on Signal for a while but only have three contacts. Arlene was keen to know how I was going and Violet was free for dinner.
I am not familiar with the other privacy focused apps in the article. I seem to recall that @shirbo is running a matrix server but I have never looked into it. It might be a good topic for one of our sessions.
Gentlemen, thank you for the information. Very informative.
It’s closed off and requires an account, but the web-based client is https://chat.crilly.au/ and the direct TLS IRC port (which doesn’t need an account, but does need a password) is irc.crilly.au port 6697.
This is good to know, thank you. I used ChatGPT to get similar answers.
To be honest, I think my approach is going to one that creates an IRC based community of people who are, like me, sick of the AI slop, spam, having everything they do used as a product, avatar decorations being sold to idiots who want a sparkly cat sitting on their avatar’s head whist they chat for $10, and other nonsense like that.
… God I’m old and grumpy LOL
I really like Signal. It has audio calls built in, but I don’t think that includes group calls or screen sharing.
I’ve had untold number of people tell me to avoid Matrix (regardless of the server of choice) as it’s apparently a mess and difficult to maintain. One of the guys telling me that works for Cisco at huge scale, so that’s saying something.
I feel like if I was to build anything, I’d want it to be around in ten years from now with very, very little work.
