I’m not sure why you are digging up old click bait articles but this isn’t true. What is banned is fictional child pornography (in addition to real child porn obviously). Aka you cannot hire legally aged porn actors and have them play the role of children or create animated child pornography (also illegal in many other countries). Hentai depicting legal sexual acts would not be banned. This btw is also the source of the equally spurious “Australia banned small boobs in porn” claims.
Create your own account as administrator and make non-admin accounts for your sons to limit privileges of software they install. Some games may require admin rights (anti-cheat mostly), so you might prefer to provide them an administrator account and try to educate them on privacy and malware and how to only install trusted software but that is for you to decide based on their maturity.
Make sure they only obtain games from trusted stores such as steam, itch.io, gog, epic. I’m not philosophically against piracy but software piracy is very risky.
Another thing is to teach them to not install hacks and cheats even if you think they wouldn’t do it in a million years. As a LAN organiser I have known several good kids that have experimented with hacks, I don’t believe this is a significant moral failing for a child but it is extremely risky software for security and a good way to get banned from the local gaming scene.
General security and privacy practices apply as always, use anti-virus on Windows, use a password manager, use 2FA, never share passwords, principle of minimum privilege ie use non-admin as much as possible.
Use floss and privacy respecting sevices as much as possible… but kids are going to play the games their friends play and discord is hard to avoid.
If their social circle is not already embedded in discord then consider self hosting a VoIP server for them.
My post is in fact based directly on the Mastodon developer’s public statements to this effect
These apps are being developed specifically as means of onboarding new users to mastodon from the app store ecosystem’s “foot traffic”. It makes sense for them to want a limited pool of users for beta to ensure the apps are well polished before the intended audience of less technically inclined people unfamiliar with mastodon use them. How you obtain the pool of beta testers is probably not overly important, using an invite system for example would probably result in largely the same group of insiders who are likely to be patreon supporters having access anyway.
I will dm you an invite.
Beehaw has more or less superseded tildes though.