Announcing Lift Squad: A Creep-Proof Online Community for Kids

If you've got a lonely school-aged kid at home, please read this. It's the next phase in Lift Academy, a project I've been posting about here on IH since June!

Join the Lift Squad!
TLDR: Lift Academy's Lift Squad

The goal is to start connecting kids RIGHT NOW who are looking for new friends or who have trouble communicating with their existing school friends because they don't have appropriate messaging apps, etc. I see kids all the time being like "Hey add me on Minecraft I'm DRAGONSLAYER74XX221232" and it's tragic because the chances of that being remembered are slim...

So I've created a safe online community for kids as part of the Lift Academy efforts. The actual Lift Academy events and classes will show up in this interface when they're ready. Every student in the Academy is also a member of the Lift Squad, so this is the ground level!

It's a positive and uplifting community where absolutely no CREEPS are allowed to register. How? I use video to verify every single member, and make sure a parent is backing their kid up.

I think you'll find the registration process interesting. If you can think of a way to trick it, please let me know.

What the LIFT SQUAD offers right now..

Find NEW friends by searching
Find OLD friends by trading codes
Get paired up by the Buddy Match system
Read about online safety
Trade gamer tags
Make little posts (kind of like Facebook, but safe for kids)

Coming very soon:

More post/chat options
More content for kids
The first live interactive show
Profile pics for kids

The platform uses data signals like age range and zip codes to determine matches. Kids get to see if someone is close to their age or not like this "Is MUCH older than you" or "About the same age"

They can set preferences for girls/boys/etc. Will add more preferences soon for ridiculous amounts of interest-level filtering.

Kids near you (same zip code) will show up as being near you, which is a nice benefit to find your actual friends in real life and trade gamer tags.
When someone makes a friend request, we note the age difference, and track IP addresses. There are already EXTENSIVE metrics in the platform and I'm adding more every day.

I'm going to keep signups free for a bit while users are being added to the platform and I'm working out the kinks which will come up. Of course, if you'd like to support this ginormous project, you can sign up for a paid account too 🙂

**Yes, I know it's useful for gamers/adults too to trade gamertags all in one place, but this community is for kids under 18. They're the ones who need protection, and who need a safe place to find and play with friends.

I'm launching this at the first moment it's barely usable. I expect to be mortified with errors and silly things but I need to launch it sometime.

IMPORTANT.. if you'd like to sign up to moderate/monitor, send me your feedback or hate, or get involved in ANY WAY, please let me know. It's just me at the moment, and it's a tremendous amount of work, but I'm convinced our kids could benefit greatly with having a safe online place to find new (good quality) friends, and not deal with the lack of repercussions which come from normal online behaviors.

Please use the code 'DaveYIHPost0827' so I know where you came from!