Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?

Slack and Discord both have options or default to preventing external messages. Discord is probably the easiest since you can just make yourself a moderator which gives you a lot of power. If you need to prevent curious kids from joining or accessing other servers/groups then that's a lot harder since eventually they will learn to use Discord via the web browser, etc.

You could run a Mumble instance for voice and text communication. [1] And just give everyone a Jitsi video conferencing link (needs to be kept private/secret or rotate it often). [2] The downside to this option is that every kid/parent needs configure this.

[1] https://www.mumble.com/ [2] https://meet.jit.si/

Our kids do Minecraft on their iPads; the official Microsoft Realms seems to work a little better than the servers I used to stand up, especially when some of the kids they play with are using PCs and XBoxes. It’s ~$8 a month, which is more than it should be, but still not ridiculous.

The kids usually start a voice FaceTime group chat and then start up Minecraft, which keeps the voice chat going in the background. It works great. (If they are playing with someone that doesn’t use FaceTime: I’m pretty sure that the Facebook Messenger for Kids app also works)

I’ll also put in a plug for the Apple Watch cellular - we have them for the kids using the family setup. The kids then have a phone without having a phone, they have the blue iMessage bubble in chat, etc. But no camera, no bad social apps, etc. And you can have them delegate management of their address book to your phone and then set the watch to ignore everything except contacts in the address book. A side benefit is that each watch is $10 a month instead of the $30-50 per month a real phone costs.

A group call via a regular phone can do everything you're describing.

I suppose there's no guarantee it'll work, but I just checked and you can apparently get an old vintage Motorola Razr on eBay for $10. They can just get phone numbers and text each other without needing to use a web platform. I'm guessing here the objection to a mobile phone is about unrestricted app and web usage and screen time, not just having a handheld communications device.

I'm tempted to say this would be less addictive than a smart phone, but thinking back to being a kid, my sister was almost always on the phone talking to her friends, so maybe not. But it at least restricts you to talking to people you already know and doesn't enable meeting arbitrary strangers.

> Safe for kids

> FB

Thumbs down.