- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
For the past year the topic of a safe and suitable internet for children has been on my mind. Recent laws in various places, combined with parental outcry and action groups have made this matter more pressing. In this period, I connected with others and we have slowly started to work on a solution. The idea boils down to a general scheme that can be adopted by the Nostr ecosystem to provide an interoperable solution. Our group will lead the charge, but we are very open to dialogue and we encourage everyone to think and develop alongside us. The purpose of this article is above all a call to action for anyone interested and with opinions or ideas on the matter, to get involved.
I identify the situation as follows. Essentially it is a matter of risk management through trust. The risks are varied, from unwanted content to unwanted interactions. You want to avoid bad content like gore, you want to avoid bullies or worse and you want content that aligns with the norms and values of the upbringing you have in mind for your child. Given that the internet is a vast space, we need a method that is practical in achieving this. The complicating factor in all of this is that, especially when children get older, your ability as a parent to enact control over what your child is exposed to wanes. Their social circles grow and they become more crafty in escaping whatever blockades you have set up. Becoming more independent is a crucial part of growing up, but the internet itself contains so many harmful elements that the risks quickly become too large.
It is for this reason the resolute urge to ban, block, limit and clamp down on the internet and the hardware and software to access it, for the sake of the children, is at the very least understandable. Unfortunately it is a road that certain jurisdictions are already going down to varying degrees. Banning smartphones, mandatory government ID uploads; they are all exponents of a method that can only move in the direction of being more totalitarian. That is to say, the logic is that the entirety of the internet has to adjust to the risk tolerance we have in relation to children, forcing adults to give up their free and open internet.
The best way to counter this dynamic is to come up with an alternative, simply because the demand for a safe and suitable internet for children won’t go away and is reasonable to begin with. It is a hard problem, not just because it is a matter of moderation, but perhaps more importantly one of incentives. Creating separate locked-down environments for your child is not that hard. The issue is as mentioned before, at a certain point children have motivation to break free from that environment. The older they get, the more these restrictions become more apparent because they realize there is more out there, perhaps via interactions with peers who operate in less or differently restricted environments.
This leads me to the following:
- No Bubble Boy: any demand for zero-risk is unreasonable. Instead, the demand should be on the ability to control for risk, such that freedoms can increase as they grow older, in line with what a parent deems a reasonable level of responsibility in relation to the child’s level of development.
- Overly restrictiveness is motivation for escape. Following 1, the system should be flexible in its ability to adapt to the ever-changing social context of a child while growing up, and allow for interactions with others to the degree that moderation overlaps.
- Internet hygiene. As with anything, what is appropriate depends on time, place and crowd. The system should be able to enforce what occurs where, and under what name. Teaching children how to navigate the internet while protecting them from mistakes.
- Practicality. Parents should actually be able to operate the system, given that they have more to do in their lives other than judging content, and figuring out complicated settings.
With those four things in mind, I think Nostr specifically is able to provide a solution. To be clear, this is a moonshot project. It will require all aspects and tricks in the Nostr toolbox, from cryptography, clients, relays, web of trust and signing bunkers. With the long list of requirements and low risk tolerance involved some complexity is unavoidable. Yet this will only succeed if it remains simple enough such that developers actually bother to implement these things in an interoperable way. Months of thinking and internal discussion has led to an initial proposal of something that is semi-concrete. Hopefully it is enough of a starting point that open discussion can be had such that it can be optimized and find support in the broader ecosystem.
In the next article I will provide a technical description of the system I have in mind.
You must log in or # to comment.
I was thinking about this yesterday after the post about foss parental control apps.
My guiding principles in coming up with a solution are that I am NOT a fan of the nuclear family, how parents have essentially ownership over their kids, and would prefer a society that fights against childism and treats them more as full fledged members of the community with significantly more agency than they do now. I think this can be done while still protecting them from bad actors - and in fact, such a society would protect them far better if the bad actors in question are their legal guardians.
So firstly, I value teaching kids how to properly recognize and handle situations that make them uncomfortable, rather than just trying to ban all potentially uncomfortable situations. There’s age appropriate ways to explain why people shouldn’t be asking you for nude photos, for example. To a degree, any private chats with just other adults should be treated with skepticism and concern. Ideally, they would let you know whenever an adult tries to form such a chat/DM.
I also think the internet is “too big” (and this goes for adults too). You interact with so many people, you can’t really rely on things like reputation and feel a sense of community like you do with people who are in your physical locality. Bringing up nostr and a web of trust is a great way to help with that imo. E.g. you can only interact with friends of friends of friends. It makes the internet smaller and more intimate and with a number of people you can actually wrap your head around.
A third thing (and last for this post, although there’s probably more) is that interaction between kids and adults in public view should be more encouraged. Part of the childism within our society is segregating kids to their own areas. I think having regular interactions with adults can help model what healthy interactions should look like, and it being in public enables the community to call out problematic behaviors when they happen.
Devon Price has a series of articles on child liberation I recommend, and some of these ideas are pulled from there. Highly recommend.
And fwiw, while a parent myself, my son is <2 and can’t read yet, so these are just things I’ve thought about but not implemented.
I have never heard the term ‘childism’ before. I was unaware of a single term to conver ‘youth appreciation’. I have usually you used the later phrase or something similar to it.
I’m going to have to think about whether I want to use it or not. Personally I try to avoid using the c-word as it feels very oppressive in and of itself.
In this case I used the term childism as an -ism like racism. It’s a bit confusing of a term, admittedly.
FYI I have been a strong proponent of youth rights since I was a teen becoming a parent has not changed that. If anything seeing the oppression my daughters and their friends are expected to capitulate to, at a higher rate than I ever was Asa boy, has increased my dedication to such ends.
For example my daughters are unschooled, something a younger zjti8eit would never had supported.
My desire for #kidstr to be successful is not connected to my desire to to limit their choices but to help us achieve mutual goals. I want to encourage my daughters to choose Free Software and avoid having capitalists direct their life whenever possible. They want to enjoy their online experience more. For example they use ‘grown up’ YouTube accounts linked to my wife’s email because the Kids’ YouTube interface is so limited you can’t even search for particular videos, but they don’t like that they see scarry things in their feed and in advertisements.
Please note the above is a copy/paste from someone else’s post from nearly a month ago. I just saw this post earlier today. I have no involvement with this project, but it sounds like what I have been looking for. A while ago I was trying to find a kid focused Mastodon instance to set my daughter’s up on and I was basically told either that I was a sicko or that if anyone did set one up it would be full of sickos.
Right now we restrict the kid’s net access through opendns - they can access only certain websites and everything else gets blocked. This will work until they’re old enough to figure out how to edit their own config file. Cross that bridge when we come to it I guess.
It has worked very well so far.
My dad did something like this at the network level, so nothing I could do from my computer could bypass it, but he used a blacklist system rather than a pure whitelist, so I just had to play cat and mouse with proxies. It was extremely funny to me that the one that worked consistently for years was designed for Westerners in China to get around the Great Firewall, it also worked from my Western home to get around Dad’s network level filtering and wasn’t blocked by the automatic “proxies” filter setting, because he managed to, likely unintentionally, block a commie website that had a bunch of interesting stuff, but I just went on it for the theory library. (And asking that man to whitelist a communist website was a fool’s errand.) So I would load up an explicitly anti CPC political tool, to read communist theory. That was hilarious to thirteen year old me.
I actually kind of like that idea as it is, among other things, encouraging them to learn how to edit their own config file.
Oh she’ll definitely get around it eventually. I do appreciate that I am helping to raise one of the very few actually-computer-literate children of her generation. Hell even Gen Z kids don’t know how to edit a PDF file or do basic file management. Damn kids these days only know how to click on squares in their walled-garden mobile device
Not a parent so I don’t have any emotional stake in “finding a way” to make a safe internet experience for various ages of children… but my answer would be a pretty confident, “Probably not.”
Best you can probably manage would be a Swiss Cheese method of various technical band-aids to blacklist/whitelist or otherwise limit access to sites and domains combined with limiting unsupervised screen time mixed with a healthy dose of constantly talking to the kid about why certain things are blocked or limited. But now you’re constantly going to have to be having the conversation with the child as they get older and want/need to have those restrictions relaxed.
Which is going to come up against the question of “does every parent who wants a safe experience for their young children on the internet have the time, energy, interest, and knowledge to do these things?”
So a kid from one household who’s parents are really gung-ho about a locked down internet experience will just go to their friend’s house where the parents aren’t gung-ho about a locked down internet. Kinda like a kid who’s parents don’t let them drink soda at home but can’t really stop them from drinking soda at a slumber party outside of being banned from going to the sleep overs. This isn’t to say that the parent who has tight internet restrictions for their own household is wrong or is wasting their effort but those parents must absolutely understand that their kids will still be exposed to the bad things from the internet.
So along with needing to have a Swiss Cheese methodology to their locked down internet protocols for their kids at home, the parent will also need to add to their list of things to do, “figuring out what to do when the kid gets exposed to a harmful thing from the internet.” Which, I definitely do not envy.
Out of curiosity, if you aren’t a parent why are you browsing the parenting lemmy community?
I don’t browse any community specifically, just the “home page.” This poped up and I did not feel my comment was too far out of line to post.
We all were kids at one point. I do have very strong memories of adults refusing to engage with me as a “person who is slowly becoming an adult over time” about things that directly affected me. As a full adult now-a-days, I think I can sympathize with a parent’s desire to protect their kids from all the bad in the world. But I also wonder if things could have been better had adults attempted an effort to treat “child aged” me less as a non-entity in my own life. All it taught me was that if I got into a situation that got out of control, bringing an adult into the situation to help would just make the problem worse.
Did you read the article I linked?
