You need to be a teenager before the internet police will even let you use a lot of services.
Now, the internet police are scared for two reasons. First of all, having access to messaging services as a child has a totally insane amount of risks. Children are just learning how to live life, so naturally they would need to be more trusting and sharing. Normally, parental figures would use these qualities to help their children learn and grow. Strangers on the internet, however, exploit them to make children do a bunch of things that they have no idea are harmful until it's too late. Here are just a few things strangers do to children on the internet:
- Act harmless, or even pretend to be another child, try to befriend the children, and then suggest or tell them to give out personal information like their real name, home address, telephone number, personal photos, other numbers like social security and spending cards, and more. They could also ask them to call them apparently (they can see the phone number when they do). If they have any one of these, it's easier for them to search the internet for the rest of the information, and even those of parents and relatives.
- Use the information to steal the children's identities, so they can pretend to be them and waste their money online, or do this to their friends.
- Ask the children to do terrible things they have no idea is terrible you should definitely not look up at your age to see what they are, because, you really won't like it. I can assure you. I'll give you an overly simple example. Do you know about cyberbullying? Do you know how it feels when other people are mean? Imagine if they got you to send them embarrassing pictures (with you still trusting them), and then they sent them around to their friends and they're laughing at you on the internet for being such a fool. Well, they'll do much worse than this.
- Try to meet up with the children in real life to do any number of things like steal whatever they have when they come out, beat them up, act like a bully, kidnap them, tie them to a chair in a truck and pressure them to share even more information (or get beat up again and again) or something, send them to very large, organised and abusive groups of bullies (such as cohorts and slave-masters), and more. Look, you WILL be shocked at how silly, childish, mean, violent and cruel adults can get. That really says a lot about our society.
They don't even have to talk to you. On the internet, there are records of everything you've ever posted on it (i.e. spying and data collection), and strangers can just quietly search for who you are with more and more information until they can just go and spend all your money. You do not want that. Beyond Discord, there are lots of websites on the internet that share your location with your posts. Adults are better at responsibility and self-defence, so it's safer for them to go there than children whose information and routines can be tracked by whoever can see the information.
Strangers aren't even the only ones you should be worried about on the internet. If you posted something terrible online, even by accident, and even when you were just in a bad mood, people will remember that for generations to come. And they'll judge you for it. You'll have a worse reputation. If you want a good job, people might know what you did and think you're not fit to do the job, because you're dumb, moody, lazy, someone who has the potential to do bad things again, or whatever. Of course, you want a good job so you can get the monies to be comfortable on top of buying and renting survival items like food and house-shelter. Many other people who would give you important things could reject you for these things. Apparently if you joke about crimes (which people can frame you for), and you go to court, people will have to give your information to them. A number of other problems are explained at various articles I looked up about why exactly children need online privacy, which is why they have laws that make Discord and many other websites ban everyone suspected of being younger than a teenager.
You probably will want to control your information on the internet and have privacy when you grow up so you can have freedom and not feel oppressed. Look at me. I'm cringing about so many things I did when I was younger and I did a bunch of stupid things on the internet. Things probably could be a lot worse for me. Apparently kids don't even get to the formal operational stage, an important way of thinking, until they're twelve
The internet police are obviously scared because if children are harmed, that harms future grown-ups who will be important workers and social participants. Plus, just that "children are precious". But also, the second reason the internet police are scared is that if they are caught doing nothing about children's online safety and not setting out widespread laws and regulations to prevent these things, they'll get negative press and complaints from other people that would harm their own businesses. So even if they're just money-hungry corporate groups that run the place where other people interact and they just do some things, it would be in their interest to do these things.
Now I know you just went to the EternityDev Discord Server where there's probably a lot of active, trusted individuals, but even they have to watch out for people trying to trick them and other things. You don't know who you're talking to. Obviously a responsible person who knows they're talking to an 8-year-old would try to shove them out immediately. Because the bad people would suck them in, instead.
And that would be bad
If you want to comment on the server, just do it here in the meantime. You seem lucky to be here. Don't ruin it