It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.

🤮

Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?

As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.

There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like “but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately” or something like that.

Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won’t do the work unless there’s money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they’re better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I’m sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it’s idealistic at best to depend on them.

Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.

Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.

And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.

political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.

It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.

My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.

He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.

My kids had full internet use with only porn and advertising blocking, except for “homework time”, as well as no restrictions on video games (except for fucking Roblox). They recently graduated high-school at the top of their class and continue doing great in university.

They grew up to be nice, well-rounded young men who make friends easily, aren’t assholes, aren’t glued to their cell phones (which they had since they were little), don’t mindlessly watch TV, can easily switch tasks and “buckle down” when they have to, and have a great work ethic. They grew up with the attitude that internet/cell phones are tools, not rewards or distractions. Once they hit high-school I found I no longer needed to monitor them (and it was starting to feel creepy and invasive). When they had to study they studied, on their own without prompting or timers.

I had no worries because I know how to read papers, and there was (and still is) ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that doing so would be harming, but in fact the reverse is true.

Kids grow up to be like their parents. Don’t want them to be assholes? Then don’t be an asshole. Want them to grow up with a reading habit? Then read for yourself. It’s that easy.

It’s interesting to see that their friends who had strict internet/gaming rules ended up turning into complete shitheads they no longer associate with.

I feel like it will be more common to heavily restrict the tech access of children as people who actually grew up using the internet become parents.

I also plan to restrict my (future hypothetical) children from internet access until 13 or so, depending on maturity. So your comment gives me some optimism in that regard.

I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.

You went to a school where they had no controls over what you could and couldn’t access?

My school was blocking harmful content on their computers when i was there in the mid to late 2000s.

When i got home i had something called CyberSitter on my computer in my room that sent logs of all my internet usage as reports to my dad.

It took me until 16 when i went out and bought my own computer with my own money before i had “unfettered” access to the internet.

Were these tools impenetrable fortresses? no, of course not. but they were a damn sight better than the ISP level blocks and legislating the “good” companies out of existence that the UK (and others) Government is currently engaged in.

Not that any of this is really about “protecting kids” anyway

And how do you , practically, do that?

By paying attention to your child.

Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.

Yes, by paying attention to their children.

Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.

Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.

Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.

If you give a child a tablet or phone, you should probably pay attention to what they are doing with it. You wouldn’t just give them a full tool box to play with unsupervised.

Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work

Yep, by paying attention to the kid.

No parent has time for that.

Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that’s a basic fucking part of parenting.

And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult

Maybe you should pay attention to your kid and not let them have unsupervised access to the whole Internet until they are ready for it?

because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.

Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It’s called parenting.

I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.

Let’s not pretend that phones and the Internet only started existing in 2026 too. I was a child in the 90’s, during the real “Wild West” days of the internet. If anything, parents have more tools and controls over what their child can access in 2026 than they did in 2000. There weren’t “child” cellphone controls when I got my first phone. My dad didn’t give me one until I both needed it, and was mature enough to have it. The parental controls on my old Window 2000 machine were laughably easy to defeat. Do you know what kept me out of trouble though? My dad paid attention to when I used the computer, what I was doing on there, and how much I was doing it.

Either parent your kid, or don’t, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.

By talking to your fucking kids lmao

Like, have a conversation with them. Treat them like a person, a real human being, with thoughts and feelings and basic decision making capabilities, instead of treating them like a wild animal that needs to be leashed.

Everyone immediately thinks “it’s impossible for parents to be aware of and block everything they don’t want their kids to look at on the Internet!”. But maybe the first step should just be talking to your kids about what you do/do not want then looking at on the Internet, and trusting that they’ll heed your warnings. Tight fisted control over what your kids can/can’t see on the Internet should be the last resort.

Devices given to children can be configured to restrict access to unwanted things. Obviously, school networks already are.

The only uncontrollable thing would be kids seeing things via friends with less observant parents, but that is not a new thing.

No, it’s the not the same but there are options you’re ignoring.

We don’t need to kid-proof all of society. Adults deserve things like freedom and privacy and to not be treated like children.

You dont give children tablets and phone, full stop.

Exactly, how can you limit a child who knows internet and technology more than their parents? Like, if I was a child I don’t think they could limit me at all

Exactly, it’s basically impossible to control as a parent, but just blaming the parents is a simple solution for many. Everybody loves their easy solutions to complex issues: left, right and center.

Should be pretty evident from the comment.