This could be hugely impactful to art communities sharing the things they work on. First, the line between porn and mere nudity is often vague and nebulous, such as in paintings or others forms of art. This is an absolutely bizarre move by Apple on so many levels. Then there’s Apple’s demands placed on Discord. I still think sex and nudity are far, far, far less damaging or worrisome than the insane amounts of brutal violence children get exposed to in movies, TV series, games, and the evening news, but I understand American culture sees these things differently. Labeling these channels as such is, while not a panacea, an understandable move, also from a legal standpoint. There’s the tighter restrictions by Discord, which I think are reasonable – you don’t want minors or adults who simply aren’t interested in rowdier conversations to accidentally walk into channels where people are discussing sex, nudity, or porn. Tumblr infamously wiped porn from its entire platform in order to come into compliance with Apple’s rules.
But the bigger limitation is that it prevents NSFW servers from being accessed on iOS devices - a significant restriction that’s almost certainly meant to cater to Apple’s strict and often prudish rules around nudity in services distributed through the App Store. First, it prevents anyone under the age of 18 from joining. Discord previously allowed individual channels to be marked as NSFW and age-gated. Entire servers can now be marked as NSFW if their community “is organized around NSFW themes or if the majority of the server’s content is 18+.” This label will be a requirement going forward, and Discord will proactively mark servers as NSFW if they fail to self-identify.