Nobody can join yet. That is the plan.
Skriza is not public. You get in with an invitation handed out by hand, and a person reads every application. It stays that way until the things meant to protect younger users are actually working — not until a launch date we announced in advance.
What we are working on, in this order
In order, because each step rests on the one before it. The finished rows can be checked; the rest is here so you can hold us to it.
Reporting with reasons: anyone subject to a measure is told why, whether automated means were involved, and what it rests on (DSA Art. 16 and 17).
Profile pictures go through an automated content check. Anything objected to is seen by a person before it appears anywhere.
Retention periods for moderation data, enforced daily by a job rather than by good intentions.
Age assurance. Self-declaration is not enough, and the Commission says so explicitly in its guidelines of 14 July 2025. We are integrating the EU age-verification blueprint, and later the EUDI wallet that every Member State must offer by 6 December 2026.
Accounts under 16 become receive-only: read, watch, learn — no profile picture, no public posts, no direct messages. Enforced on the server, not by hiding buttons.
Parental controls for content, contacts and time, built with parents and educators.
A youth-protection officer under § 7 JMStV and legal sign-off on the data-protection impact assessment. Both before opening, not after.
Why the order is the product
The familiar headlines about platforms and minors share a backstory: launch, grow, make money, and retrofit protection once there is no other option. We have no reason to think we are cleverer than the people that happened to. So we reversed the order and accepted the slower route.
What children will be able to do here
Read, watch, learn. No profile picture, no public profile, no direct messages. That is stricter than the EU asks for, and it has an awkwardly practical reason: an account that creates almost nothing needs almost no consent. That removes the proof of parental permission which larger providers keep failing at, because it simply cannot be obtained reliably.
What the law requires of us, and what it does not
Art. 28 DSA governs the protection of minors. Under Art. 19 DSA it does not apply to micro enterprises like us. We follow the Commission's guidelines on it anyway. What does bind us with no exemption at all is Art. 8 GDPR: under 16 in Germany needs a parent's permission. We write that down because a platform claiming a duty it does not have gets found out on the first question.
Advertising
There is no advertising on Skriza. When there is, it will be vetted and never shown to minors: no profiling, no manipulative formats, no loot-box mechanics dressed up as a game. That is a commitment for launch, not a description of something running.
No addiction engineering
No streaks that punish a break, no number that drops because you missed a day. The feed is chronological today. The ranking we are building rewards posts people argue about rather than posts people merely see — the formula is published on our ranking page.
Data
Data minimisation, no tracking profiles, hosting in the EU, and deletion that deletes. Honestly, though: today we cannot tell who is a minor. That is exactly why the platform is closed.
What you can hold us to
- We do not open before age assurance and parental controls are working — not even if the timing is commercially inconvenient.
- No advertising to children. No profiling of minors. Not later, not in a watered-down form.
- What we cannot do yet is on this page and on our status page — not in the small print.
- Every moderation decision is reasoned, logged, and made by a person.
- The operator is a named person with a postal address in the imprint, not a PO box.