HarkMahlberg

Yeah I meant the fact that it was edited didn't federate.

Hm, it didn't seem to federate to kbin.

It's not the worst idea. Tons of software goes through "closed betas," or "canary builds," or invite-only phases like this to test at scale, in a production-like scenario, but without opening the floodgates and getting inundated with issues reported by regular people. Heck even Fediverse websites sometimes close their registration pages if they're getting more signups than the admins/mods can handle. And that makes perfect sense, the last thing you want is to suddenly become unsustainably huge. It leads to a kind of social rot: trolls run free without enough mods to stop them, spammers run rampant, etc.

"Don't allow Perfect to become the Enemy of Good."

.yu for Yugoslavia. Yeah.

I don't have a solution, I'm not that clever lol. Though I also think dismantling social networking is an overreaction, like humans understand object permanence, we know we can talk to people when they're not in the same room as us. The internet, social media, are just technological extensions of that ability. I'm not pointing out flaws in good ideas because I want to sink them, I'm pointing them out because someone may yet have a solution to that downstream problem, which would strengthen the idea even further.

I mean here's an idea to combat abusive relationships, one that's not reliant on any technology: make social media platforms mandatory reporters. I'm sure there's flaws in this idea too, but it may be somewhere to start if we're trying to tackle the issue of minors being harassed or abused on the internet.

It does sound good. It's not a bad idea, but have you considered certain problematic situations that may get worse when you introduce a feature like this? For instance, an abusive parent could use such a "parent-child account" to control their victim's online activity, prevent them from accessing contraception or abortion services, restrict access to LGBT material and communities, etc. This leads to one of two things: a victim unable to navigate the internet on their own (in conjunction with other restrictive and abusive practices levied by the adult), or the victim creating their own hidden account without that oversight, (needing to lie about their age to make that happen, in order to access resources they may need).

At the end of the day, we're still talking about technological solutions to human problems, and it's just the wrong tool for the job. Maybe "wrong" is too harsh, but regardless, it's not ideal.

One idea is that you could follow Romeo-Juliet laws. Programmatically, it's not difficult to add such a condition to some presumed friend-finding algorithm. Forgive any formatting problems below...

if user.age < 16:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(0, 18)
else if user.age >= 16 and user.age < 18:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(user.age - 2, user.age + 2)
else:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(18, 99)

The problem isn't the implementation, it's the concept in the first place. If you're spinning up a new Lawful Good social media site, you can make it do whatever you want. The problem is how many different states have different laws about how minors can or cannot enter relationships with people of different ages. Then once you stop considering different states, now consider different countries. The internet is accessible to anyone, no matter their age, no matter their location. Writing a website that can handle every possible situation is not impossible, but may be prohibitively expensive.

And of course, I didn't even talk about people lying about their age on their accounts! How does a website even verify that? To what degree are they liable? You want to upload an ID to make an account?

In high school I became the president of a community outreach club. Prior to that point, I had no social media accounts. At least, nothing we could call social media today. My tech-savvy father taught me the principle of "never tell anyone on the internet who you are, or where you live, or how old you are." I played games with online people who were likely much older than me, but they all seemingly followed that rule too, even if voice chat gave away my age. Nobody ever asked each other "A/S/L" etc.

The club supervisor however, insisted that I create a Facebook account. "Students don't communicate over email anymore," he said, "if you want the club members to know when an event is happening and verifying how many members will be attending, you need to set up a Facebook page for the club, and you need to administer that page." And it was true... to a point. I was also part of a robotics team that did mostly communicate via email, but we also had a Facebook page so team scouters could form alliances with other teams from neighboring schools. My supervisor and my parents both knew my account (not the credentials) so the account wasn't an unknown quantity.

In retrospect, neither of those approaches to social media were wrong per se, they were simply solutions to different problems: the problem of being a kid making friends on an internet full of adults, and of needing to reach out to real people and communicating and coordinating and cooperating with them.

To this day, I refuse to "connect" different accounts together so that no streams get crossed. But amoral corporations like Google and Facebook do not care about your privacy or your legal status - they want to know everything about you in order to market and advertise to you more effectively. It's an arms race of tying humans to accounts, and driving engagement: Age, Sex, Location, What Sites You Visit, What Programs You Run, What You Buy, Where You Read News, all of that is ammunition in the race. I don't envy parents nowadays, I can't imagine the scale of the problem where every kid has a smartphone and a dozen different accounts (or some all encompassing Google/FB single-signon) before they even reach high school.

Most of the comments are about the technical or logistical challenge of making this work, but I've got a separate concern. Who would want to pay Amazon for their heating bills? Facebook? Google? They already turned the internet to shit and made fortunes for the privilege, why would I want to pay them for waste heat? What regulations exist to make sure they don't reroute the heat away from my house or apartment while I freeze? What halts them from gouging prices for heat that is a literal byproduct of their actual business? Like I already have enough problems that come from my power and heating company being an effective monopoly on my region. I don't trust data center corps from creating the same, or worse, problems.

I'm a mixed bag of agree and disagree on these points but I'm only going to point out that the "De-Googling" trend doesn't really have anything to do with the right to be forgotten. It has more to do with enshittification - Google shutting down services, making their current services harder to use, charging money for what used to be free services, charging more money for already paid services, adding ads, etc etc. Basically people finding alternative software to Google because Google's practices have become increasingly volatile and their services less and less reliable.

OP said something I disagree with, therefore all of kbin must be like him!

How childish. I don't see anyone assuming lemmy users are all tankies because they visited lemmygrad once.