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?
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mumble.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mumble.com/</a>
[2] <a href="https://meet.jit.si/" rel="nofollow">https://meet.jit.si/</a>
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.
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.<p>Edit: reading the rest of your comment I see that this doesn't exactly meet your 'voice and video' specifications. Apologies.
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.<p>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.
Jami (<a href="https://jami.net/" rel="nofollow">https://jami.net/</a>) 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.
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.<p>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.
Messenger Kids is really good for this: <a href="https://messengerkids.com/" rel="nofollow">https://messengerkids.com/</a><p>It's made by a gross company, but they have ridiculously tight access controls.
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.<p>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....).<p>1. <a href="https://rocket.chat/" rel="nofollow">https://rocket.chat/</a>
I’m interested in this as I have a child not far behind in age.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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?