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.

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.

For real-time communication, the most suitable solutions are probably documented around https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ (note that email is not recommended for person-to-person conversations).

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.

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.

When do you think you should allow a child to have an email address? A Fediverse account is basically an email account, except that the primary inbox is shared with a lot of people rather than only one person (and the same goes for any social media account). If you wouldn’t allow someone to use an email address, you probably shouldn’t allow them to use a Fediverse account either.

At least one person who seems interested in the health of children expressed that “delaying children’s access to smartphones until high school and social media platforms until 16” is a good idea. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/ https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0MXgA2sSn8

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.

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

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

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.

Take away their access to PowerPoint

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

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

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