I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a few years now but never actually put any effort into looking it up until now, I wanted to know what is out there in terms of self hosting services for kids, not necessarily just parental control but rather stuff for kids to do that aren’t just device isolated apps.
To get the conversation started, I’ve had the idea floating around my head for a few years of making some local “youtube” for my kid to upload their own videos at some point, maybe throw in some family edits and stuff like that to get the feeling of YouTube without the exposure, same with some sort of social network like a basic blog (wouldn’t have much interaction, I know, but at least have the option)
Then, I just found this video on youtube (vertical video warning for anyone who cares) which seems to do a few things of that nature, doesn’t seem like it will be foss, personally that’s not a requisite for me to use stuff but given its for children focused stuff it doesn’t sound great to me at first glance.
What else is out there? What do people piece together out of general projects? Do people even go anywhere beyond hosting their kids dvds on jellyfin/plex and calling it a day?
Jellyfin has been the thing I use most for my kids. I’ve got an account for them with their movies and TV shows. If they’re interested in YouTube videos (they like some music lyric videos and Mario play through videos) so I download these and put them onto Jellyfin to keep them away from YouTube. I’ve also put their music on the server and put a music app on their device.
The other thing I tried was deploying an Element server so they could talk to family on their own without risk of exposure to the world at large, but ended up abandoning this.
The other use of the server for kids has been to hold the ROMs for the emulator games they play and Syncthing to sync saves across devices.
One kid is interested in taking and sharing pictures so I’m thinking of making a user for him in Immich.
Jellyfin for control over what your child can watch. Qbittorrent for getting the media. Immich for organizing their photos—way better than iphone images by a landslide. Jellyfin also for music. Babybuddy for infant tracking needs. I would use ghost for blogging. I also appreciate mediawiki for a family genealogy wiki. Wireguard/Tailscale for safety. Adguard for controlling what comes into the house. Stash for keeping parents happy.
Game servers like Luanti or Veloren. For the personal Youtube, Steve on “Ask Noah” podcast has it set to automatically download new videos from a particular channel and he hosts that for his kids. My kiddos are older so I just host general services for them.
Mine are too little for now for much more but I have gotten them successfully to use our Emby server for videos and music. Calling that a win.
Depending on age/interest there’s stuff like luanti
TIL, thanks!
Jellyfin needs a client with a YT Kids UI with auto-downloads. I haven’t found one yet. As for kidney, it looks so simple to replicate that I really can’t believe they are expecting to make money from it.
You could auto download channels with YouTube-DL, which can sort them automatically into folders that Jellyfin is pointed to as a YT Kids library, then make the kids an account that can only access that Jellyfin library.
I host habitica for the family, that plus jellyfin it’s a start. (Also a Minecraft server)
as a parent, I dont have time to keep up with the stuff I host for the family as it is.
something like the kids-net would be amazing, but I do wander how much curating it takes to get it all working
Fireshare?
Excellent question! Commenting to follow.
