Oh boy, this has been fun... I never said I had banned my kids from all SM for all time. I was just pointing out the opportunity for a fediverse project.

Some of you are clearly not parents. You can be on the permissive side of parenting style but that doesn't mean you open the entire internet wide open when they hit 13.

She laughed through the entire powerpoint presentation. She thought it was a funny way to bring it up. We never said "no." We told her she had valid points and lets keep discussing. She just turned 15 and this is the first time she asked for access.

And if anyone is wondering, we Ok'd IG because friend group was there too and moving off of Snap because of the number of creeps.

I'm definitely banning them from Lemmy though, lol

Take away their access to PowerPoint

If you were my parent, I would have actively resented for the rest of my life from you for destroying my social life like that. Communicating with peers and engaging with them in their 3rd spaces is essential life learning.

And the next step would be finding ways to circumvent your ridiculous rules.

You’re not going to create a perfect adult free from social media use. You’re going to create an adult who doesn’t want to know you because you’re a control freak.

You’re the equivalent of those Christian nuts removing Harry Potter books from their kids for promoting devil worship.

Also you protect them from online bullying by putting them in a situation that definitely could get them bullied irl? Like ha your parents dont even let you have snapchat they see your daughter as immature compared to them

They want to have private conversations with their friends, they will never feel comfortable if you force your way into their social lives or not let them have them, teens dont communicate how they used to, if they arent in the groupchats its basically like missing school that year or being nobody

They will encounter the awful sides of the internet in their lives. It is a fact of the internet.

What are you doing/going to do to prepare them for that eventuality?

You can't protect children from life—you can only prepare them to handle it as best they can.

Strict parents create sneaky kids.

It's good that you're protective, but be careful not to be overly protective, kids need to think for themselves, make mistakes and learn from them.

• Dad can I have Snapchat?
• But we have Snapchat at home!

This is you rn. She wants to keep up with her friends, not participate in your ideology.

First: you've done good, raising a kid that asks for your permission first.

Second: realize that this comes from peer pressure, them wanting a space away from parental supervision. If you truly want to make your kids savvy about the Internet, you need to assume they will eventually encounter seedy places, run into assholes, and be exposed to things like bullying.

Have a conversation: you will encounter these things. Your friends may be into them. But they can have bad effects and here is how you avoid it and how to deal if it happens to you. Talk about keeping private information private.

Be open and non-judgemental. You want them to feel safe coming to you for advice.

Be truthful and stay credible. Keep up with what's out there, but don't just buy into the latest Tiktok scare.

Talk to your kids about stuff they found that was cool or scary.

Embarrass them by using memes incorrectly.

Setting up a mastodon instance may be cool at first, but their friends are going to think it's lame with the supervision. You could still do it for a number of other reasons, but it won't prepare them for the ugly Internet.

Source: me, a parent.

"I want to protect my kid from dangers of social media so I will make him the special one in class that will potentially make them a target for bullying and harassment"

Just let the kis grow up normally like rest of us did. I feel like many of us, just like me, grew up with far more extreme/unmoderated sites like liveleak and 4chan. Heavily moderated social media is very mild to what some of us grew up with, and I'm no serial killer by any means, I only kill on tuesdays

Also, preventing your kid from doing/exploring things young statistically makes them more suspecible to getting addicted to said things later in life

matrix synapse good learning expierance on how the internet works and is more closed then snapchat so less risks

It's interesting the number of comments about parenting advice as opposed to technology suggestion.

For some clarifying points: my kids are allowed on some social media, BeReal, Youtube, Pinterest. They log into our accounts for FB Marketplace.

There is a growing acknowledgement amongst kids that smartphones and social media create mental health issues. All of my kids have asked us to limit their screen time.

I'm not an overly restrictive parent but I tend to ease my kids into things as opposed to one day it's banned, one day it's permitted. Collectively, parental controls suck on most technology platforms and at the end of the day, the corporate SM is still trying to addict you and turn you into the product.

I think what my dream is is for a simple set up of a family server with roles. So you can start with just sharing pictures with grandma and grandpa and then expand into sharing more broadly. But starting the online experience outside off of the corporate algorithms.

tbh, i don't really understand why you're doing this op. i mean its not like brainrot, addiction or whatever it is that you're trying to protect your kids from is just gonna disappear when they're gonna become adults.

just talk to them about those problems and tell them why they shouldn't do that kinda stuff if your eldest daughter is already smart enough that she convinced you abt this shes already smart enough imo

and please don't create a closed mastodon server or smthng like that with you as the admin thats just not gonna work. even if its just normal stuff (also idk abt your children but me and all my friends talk and joke about stuff that would prob look or feel very weird around someone even just a gen older, sooo even if they were talking abt normal stuff, it might look weird to you) they would probably feel awkward talking since you, a parent would be seeing those posts. like just imagine how you would feel if you were a kid and your parents would just be looking at you every time you were talking with your friends

I don't know you, your daughters, or their friends so I can't make specific recommendations. What I can say is that it's really common for teenagers who are sheltered from the dangers of the world to make more and bigger mistakes once they're unsupervised than those who get a gradual introduction.

The two main dangers of social media for most people are:

1. Encountering assholes. For girls and women, there's a high probability assholes will try to sexually exploit them. Since there are minimal consequences most of the time for sending "show me your tits", they're going to encounter that behavior eventually, and it may be easier to deal with for the first time when they have parental support.
2. Algorithmic rabbit holes. These can create the perception that problematic attitudes and behaviors are common and widely accepted when they are not. Having an open dialog with parents about anything from eating laundry detergent to Jordan Peterson can be a strong stabilizing influence.

I don't think a closed Fediverse server is likely to serve as a first step in a gentle introduction because it has neither danger and presumably no strangers to talk to. The full Fediverse might work better, as it does offer interaction with strangers. Encounters with assholes will be less frequent than on corporate social media, and any rabbit holes will be much more self-directed.

That said, when one of them is likely within a year or two of leaving home or at least having full control of her digital life, if she wants to use some corporate social media, she's probably better off doing that with some parental supervision and support than jumping in completely unprepared when you're no longer in a position to prevent it.

Her friend group has a group text and she wants to keep up with everyone but doesn’t want to get the ding notifications constantly.

This seems like a good opportunity to learn how the notification settings on her phone work.

If their friends are on Snapchat I’ll suggest that you try to bring Signal into that friend group.

I'm not a parent (and I'm glad I don't have to think about this problem myself). However, I've worked at a company that specialised in filtering internet services with many parents using it to protect their kids. I've also talked to plenty of people whose parents used to deny them whatever app the kids were on at the time. I can tell you that many kids will install apps and create accounts eventually, whether you permit them or not. I've seen the ingenious workarounds kids will come up with (using the browser app built into Windows Help to get around parental controls, combining web proxies and VPNs into an unholy homebrew Tor, or just using a burner phone outside the house), and while I appreciate the hacker culture that can develop around hiding apps from your parents, I don't think it'll be good for the relationship between you and your kids if you're too strict about this stuff.

Snapchat is popular because other kids are on there. It's mostly a stupid looking chat app. Every other chat app out there has cloned its most important features. Your kids won't be missing out on anything on there, except for the network of friends and social activities that are there. That means you won't find a Fediverse app like that, because most teenagers aren't on the Fediverse. The other kids aren't going to replace Snapchat with an app just to chat with your kids, especially not if it sends a copy of their conversations to their parents. Best case scenario, they install the app and share most of the stuff your kids are missing out on on the special server you set up so your kids don't miss too much.

As for the point your daughter made, notifications can be silenced. If your kids are worried about phone addiction or getting interrupted by notifications, help them with whatever digital wellness tools their devices come with. Every major OS, desktop and mobile, now comes with tools to limit notifications during focus time, bed time, and the ability to silence notifications for certain chats or events. I find it hard to believe that Snapchat would solve that problem and feel like it's more likely she's using an unrelated valid concern to help her case for your permission to use Snapchat.

I don't know how old your daughters are and what guidance they need, but if they're creating PowerPoints to get their desires across (bravo), I think they'd be better served with guidance than with alternatives. Instead of rejecting them, consider permitting apps like Snapchat under certain conditions (time limits, no publicly posting pictures, no strangers, etc.). It's probably also best to make the rules are clear and consistent (which means not taking away Snapchat time as punishment for arbitrary things), because that kind of stuff can cause trust issues that will still have them go behind your back. For this to work, they need to trust that you will honour the "deal". I'm not saying you should let 12 year olds go ham on social media, but letting 16 year olds on Snapchat an hour a day isn't going to kill them.

The biggest risk with these things is that kids will find a way to install these apps without you noticing, something bad happens (their online friend turns out to be a grown man, a classmate starts sending weird messages), and they're afraid of talking to you about it because they might get in trouble for having a banned app on their phone.

It's not part of the Fediverse, but Signal is a good for group chats. It's got reactions and gifs and whatnot, and you can also ignore the notifications you don't care about.

Her friend group has a group text and she wants to keep up with everyone but doesn’t want to get the ding notifications constantly.

On Android you can disable app notifications. Some apps also allow it per group/person.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.