I want to be able to allow for as much artistic freedom as possible (within the realms of legality of course) while at the same time putting measures in place to prevent the platform and its content from being used to facilitate abuse (of minors or otherwise).
Once the platform is up and running I hope to get it up to standard to meet the No Children Harmed certification, but I’m interested in hearing any further suggestions that could help promote a healthy and safe atmosphere on the site. One thing I was considering was having a page somewhere on the site providing information about how to spot red flags in regards to online predators of all sorts. I was also thinking of having a main staff blog that all users automatically follow, that in addition to posting site-relevant news, also posts thoughtful articles about things such as safe and respectable online conduct, and the separation between reality and fantasy.
What country / state are you planning to run the site out of? And predators can be difficult to spot as they don’t really follow the usual cliches or expected thought processes that well, but maybe Prostasia has some ideas on that front.
I see only text-based things on both sites. They may not be friendly to artists of drawings. fanexus’s project can still be an alternative for artists unable to read Japanese. (There are Japanese sites with (almost) full freedom of creation.)
We’re still deciding where our servers are going to be hosted; issues of latency are going to be the primary concern, but copyright and censorship laws are going to factor into the decision as well.
As you said, AO3 and ff.net are primarily text based, plus they’re archives rather than social media sites. The platform in question is going to be a social media service closer to Livejournal and tumblr which supports both text and images, and will hopefully eventually include audio and video.