Safest place for young kids to chat to friends online?

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

A group call via a regular phone can do everything you're describing.

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?

Keeping it low tech with a feature phone and sms might work.

If your into self hosting use rocket.chat

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

How big is this problem for you? Have other parents shared similar sentiments?

tick talk watches exist largely for this reason, though it requires hardware per person (child), and isn't open source or cheap.

Messenger kids works well but it is FB.

We’re building Jelly - an app for teen girls (14 and up) to hang out in their fandoms with safety built in from the start and chat via voice + creatively express themselves. Still in a closed alpha (and heavily vetting who we let in for safety reasons). https://jelly.fm but here’s a link to sign up for the Harry Potter fandom waitlist: https://zkgfozflltb.typeform.com/to/cTieoDAn

My previous background is ex Amazon and eBay. Up until last year, worked on Product at Twitter, esp on safety and integrity during my time there. Notably around misinformation, coordinated manipulation, etc. My time there has shown me how limited experiences are for kids and teens that also prioritize safety. That’s informed how we’re thinking about reactive levers like blocks, mutes, reports as well as proactive product nudges.

Your 8 year old may be too young for our demographic but sharing in case it’s useful.

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