I have an 8 year old boy who wants to chat (txt, voice, video) with his friends online, so they can arrange to play games, etc. I'm not keen on giving him a mobile phone yet and a lot of the platforms like Discord, Slack, etc don't have much in the way of parental controls. Ideally I'd like something where I (and the other parents) can supervise, moderate and control who has access to the groups and which groups the kids have access to, without having to worry about what other content and people on the platform they could be exposed to. I don't have a problem with self hosting, if that's the best option. How have others in the Hacker News collective approached this?
Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#2Maybe Minecraft if you can have the savvyness to whitelist? If you just run a Minecraft server on the internet eventually folks will find it and mess stuff up. But if you curate who has access somewhat it can be a pretty fun meeting place online.
Edit: reading the rest of your comment I see that this doesn't exactly meet your 'voice and video' specifications. Apologies.
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#3tick talk watches exist largely for this reason, though it requires hardware per person (child), and isn't open source or cheap.
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#4Maybe Minecraft if you can have the savvyness to whitelist? If you just run a Minecraft server on the internet eventually folks will find it and mess stuff up. But if you curate who has access somewhat it can be a pretty fun meeting place online. Edit: reading the rest of your comment I see that this doesn't exactly meet your 'voice and video' specifications. Apologies.
Thanks, I'd not thought of a minecraft server, most of his friends play it so it could be an option for txt chatting. I'll try spinning one up at the weekend to see how it works.
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#5At one point I seriously considered self-hosting a Rocket Chat [1] instance for very similar reasons. It seems to have a good balance of features, moderation controls, and polish while still being pretty straight-forward to host.
The main challenge I ran into was, of course, convincing folks to use it (instead of the "easier" forms of communication that they already had....).
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#6tick talk watches exist largely for this reason, though it requires hardware per person (child), and isn't open source or cheap.
Looks like a cool product, but yes not cheap and not easy to get hold of where I live (in the UK) unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#7Maybe Minecraft if you can have the savvyness to whitelist? If you just run a Minecraft server on the internet eventually folks will find it and mess stuff up. But if you curate who has access somewhat it can be a pretty fun meeting place online. Edit: reading the rest of your comment I see that this doesn't exactly meet your 'voice and video' specifications. Apologies.
Disregarding the voice and video requirements, a private Minecraft server or Realm is a pretty decent space for kids to hang out and let their creativity run wild.
10 or so years ago when Minecraft was coming out of beta, I was a precocious enough child to run a server on some spare hardware lying around the house. (Realms wasn't a thing until like 2014)
Good times were had between my friends and I, but that all changed after I started becoming intoxicated by the power. Whoops.
Give it a try, but I advise against giving a literal child the ability to ban people. I would know.
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#8Is any unsupervised access to the internet for children ever really safe? At the risk of sounding crass, why can’t they meet in real life like human beings are supposed to?
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#9Is any unsupervised access to the internet for children ever really safe? At the risk of sounding crass, why can’t they meet in real life like human beings are supposed to?
> Ideally I'd like something where I (and the other parents) can supervise
Re: Ask HN: Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?
#10Is any unsupervised access to the internet for children ever really safe? At the risk of sounding crass, why can’t they meet in real life like human beings are supposed to?
They do meet in person, at school, play dates, etc. But for the same reason adults can't always meet in person it's not always possible for them to meet (esp not all at the same time) and COVID has made that worse of course. The point is to give them a supervised and safe place they can meet online, as well. I also think it's important for children to learn about technology and how it can be used, since it will inevitably end up playing a large role in their lives, no matter what profession they eventually go into.