I have three teenage daughters who are currently not allowed on social media. But I want to give them some ability before they become adults. My eldest gave me a PowerPoint presentation on why she should be allowed on Snapchat, lol.
She made some good points. 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.
Feels like a good opportunity for a Fediverse platform. Like a closed Mastodon/Pixelfed server and have some parental controls. Any projects out there?
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
I’ve come to find that people with their hearts in the right place (such as yourself) are often attacked or ostracized on the Fediverse, especially Lemmy.
How DARE a person express traditional values??? How DARE a parent not want to be an iPad parent and let their kids do whatever they want???
It’s mind blowing and it drives me further and further away from Lemmy on the regular. Keep up the good parenting and if I could offer my advice? Find a better place to ask for things like this, because all you’ll get are moronic replies like half the replies here.
I much as I want to introduce my family to the fediverse, I will not. Except for Mastodon maybe. Way to many creeps. Tech-savy, free-tech supporter creeps but creeps anyway. My parents did the same to me at a time when all my peers were into mobile phone and not like today’s kids realising how bad it can be. I turned out fine and more knowledgable about the technolgies I did choose to use than average. I wish my parenst have keep supervising me for one or two more years more.
Keep parenting.Thank you!
I had a computer in my bedroom with a dedicated landline for dialup before most of my friends had a home computer. I turned out ok but agree, should have had a little more supervision in that area.
Fortunately, the current teenagers are much more aware of the danger than past generations. In my time, many teens thought parents just did not understand modernity and were panicking over nothing. The cyber-bulling and addiction to social media kept growing but at least the young generation has awareness.
allowing Instagram is like rolling out the red carpet for the vampire as a method of inviting it in, and then maybe having the kids lie down so their bare necks are on a silver platter.
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.
Take away their access to PowerPoint
We have the school to blame. I didn’t introduce it to them. Maybe I’ll start unschooling them too. lol
I think you kind of have to, this is how kids end up middle management. You let this go and soon they’ll be scheduling meetings that could have been emails.
Absolutely not; I wish all kids argued their case using well-thought-out presentations
I agree. But I also believe no important piece of information has ever been delivered via PowerPoint.
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
“Ha your parents don’t even let you do underage drinking, drugs and other shady activities?”
Same argument. You don’t relinquish your authority and protection as a parent because a few losers want to make fun of your kid for being raised with a mom and dad who actually give a crap about their upbringing.
Weird argument since most parents dont allow that and is something everyone hides
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
You never know whats happening, anything that seems pointless or stupid to you but important to them always out of the loop
matrix synapse good learning expierance on how the internet works and is more closed then snapchat so less risks
If their friends are on Snapchat I’ll suggest that you try to bring Signal into that friend group.
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.
Honestly, nowadays a part of the “birds and bees” talk should include an explanation of privacy settings and common Internet scams.
This isn’t a real thing is it? I never knew anyone who ever had such a talk, it was always something we’d hear about in American movies/shows, but it doesn’t actually happen does it?
I don’t have kids so I dunno if it’s still happening, but my dad had a brief and very awkward conversation with me to tell me that if I had sex to make sure to use a condom but if I ever did get a girl pregnant I could always tell him and it’d be OK, we’d figure it out, etc. Nothing fancy or anything; just the essentials to make sure I wasn’t a dumbass about sex.
“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
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.
Well because your original post was kinda misleading.
There are multiple things you talk about:
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“Ding-ding” notifications - well you can adjust notifications, to help with not developing an addiction
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her group chat - do they want to move their friend group chat to a fedi platform? Or were you just clumsily wording?
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family fedi server - that is what you are talking about now, and it’s a completely different thing. You could set up a closed-registration mastodon or vernissage instance for that, but tbh I wouldnt recommend using any ActivityPub software for the purpose of sharing private photos and messages with your family. Because there is always the danger of that data federating to all kinds of servers…
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It’s interesting the number of comments about parenting advice as opposed to technology suggestion.
Was this unexpected? It has been my experience online that people are more likely to tell you what they think you need to hear than what you asked for.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Not the most related, but if Instagram becomes an issue, there is an Instagram patched app which is DMs only
How old are they?
The minimum age for Snapchat is 13. The direct mesaaging part of it allows for fun and harmless messages between friends. I think allowing her to use it if she’s 13+ is reasonable.
What you could do is to ask her not to allow friend requests or messages from anyone who are not her friends, not to use the AI assistant (which can’t be disabled), and to not use it to consume content from influencers (which is in a separate tab to the right). You cannot really police this, but it’s not the end of the world if she sees the feed of some dumb influencer.
Position data must of course also be disabled. Snapchat is a bit creepy.
The fediverse is always (somewhat) public. Getting together with other parents to set up a Pixelfed instance to use in the friend group rather than to have them use Instagram is a cool idea, and allows parents to be admins and decide who can federate without taking control of the accounts of the kids. It might be a nice way for them to learn that whatever they do online is run by some person whom they decide to trust. And it could keep them off Instagram a little longer.
I don’t really know the first thing about parenting though, just my thoughts. It’s a tricky question.
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.
Can confirm. 38 years old still with crippling trust issues from this.
Builds into lifelong issues with trust
- 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.
Right? How dare a parent actually care about their child’s upbringing? It’s 2025, we’re supposed to give our kids an iPad at 3 years old and let Cocomelon raise them.
