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

19 points by robert_dipaolo ↗ HN
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?

32 comments

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f154hfds
Maybe 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.

robert_dipaolo
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.
Kon-Peki
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.

gear_envy
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.

andrewclunn
tick talk watches exist largely for this reason, though it requires hardware per person (child), and isn't open source or cheap.
robert_dipaolo
Looks like a cool product, but yes not cheap and not easy to get hold of where I live (in the UK) unfortunately.
jlkuester7
At 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....).

1. https://rocket.chat/

aronpye
Is 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?
cheeze
> Ideally I'd like something where I (and the other parents) can supervise
robert_dipaolo
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.
KingMachiavelli
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/

bberenberg
My little sister uses a shared Google Doc which her friends all collaboratively edit. Essentially a white board that anyone can write on at any time.
sjg007
Messenger kids works well but it is FB.
tata71
> Safe for kids

> FB

Thumbs down.

bryan_w
Second for messenger kids. All the other solutions aren't built with the idea of under 13s using their service. Messenger kids allows kids to chat with the people they know irl while preventing them from slipping out and chatting with the wide internet.

Even if you don't like FB that much, you should look at what they are doing in messenger kids

Mandatum
I'd choose an app marketed as being for kids by a major company than one that isn't. Messenger Kids is 100% being used to "capture the next generation", but at least the controls are built with their safety in mind and it's not an after-thought.
endisneigh
A group call via a regular phone can do everything you're describing.
sen
My kids (similar age) use a minecraft realm that we’ve added their friends to for text chat and to hang out virtually together, and a password protected Jitsi for video/voice.

MC is good because even if they’re not into playing the game they like just text-chatting while they walk around looking at stuff or exploring premade worlds from the free section of the store.

nonameiguess
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.

hogrider
Keeping it low tech with a feature phone and sms might work.
subpixel
I’m interested in this as I have a child not far behind in age.

If I rolled my own it would be a little like Slack, probably a single channel with threads and like a 30-day history, to keep it pretty ephemeral. The logs would be in an admin feed I would keep an eye on.

I’m not sure how long you could keep that level of control and keep other technology at bay, but it’s worth it to avoid premature connection the matrix.

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Mandatum
Messenger Kids is really good for this: https://messengerkids.com/

It's made by a gross company, but they have ridiculously tight access controls.

gaws
No one should use a Facebook/Meta product let alone their kids.
Utkarsh_Mood
How big is this problem for you? Have other parents shared similar sentiments?
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manifoldgeo
If you're not opposed to self-hosting, I've had some good experiences running Matrix Synapse to keep in touch with friends. I can't speak to content moderation, but managing the service has been really nice so far.
DaniDaniel5005
If your into self hosting use rocket.chat

Another option would be nextcloud talk (also should be self hosted)

throwaway81523
I have a self-hosted nextcloud that was not to hard to set up. Its video chat quality is not that good, but that could be on my client side. It is on a $5/m Vultr vps but that's just because it was convenient to spin one up near my geolocation to save a little latency. Otherwise an even cheaper vps wouuld be fine.
cat_adorer
Jami (https://jami.net/) has the advantage of keeping your child's communication private and lacks the ability to find outside groups (like phone calls), while having the features they would want to have to interact and being multi-platform.