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?
Mopidy-party!
Jukebox for your local digital music!
Pi-hole. It’s not an in your face app specifically for them, but I wouldn’t want them to be without it.
Additionally, I recommend unbound for those already on pi-hole.
Funny, every time someone mentions pi-hole, I have to look up why I don’t use it, and I wonder if others do the same.
My combination of pfSense and its pfBlockerNG package does pretty much same thing and more, and once I migrate to opnSense, I have high expectations I should be able to do something similar.
I don’t use pihole bc last I checked the only way to get DoH was via a deprecated and to be removed cloudflared feature
Additionally, I recommend unbound for those already on pi-hole.
Never could get unbound to work properly, it would always knock my internet out to the point of troubleshooting for hours, whether that be Pi-Hole, OpenSense or Technitium I’ve always had issues with unbound.
As much as I like hosting my own services, I want them to be reliable.
here’s what i’ve spun up so far that ive gotten the kids using
- xmpp for chats,
- emby/jellyfin
- luanti
- mealie
- calendars
- webdav for retroarch cloud
- home assistant/mopidy/navidrome for music (all they see is home assistant).
probs more but can’t think right now
That’s pretty much my list, as well!
Luanti is great, and the server can nearly run on a potato. Maybe literally, I should try it on a LePotato (Raspberry Pi II ish SBC) some time.
Jellyfin for guiding the kids to a more thoughtful non-algorithm set of things to watch has been great.
Although, for as much effort as I put into Jellyfin, my kids are as likely to drop a DVD into the DVD player, anyway.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN SBC Single-Board Computer VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #251 for this comm, first seen 21st Apr 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
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.
Matrix is a PIA to configure properly, it is nice to have once you got it running but you’ll end up spinning like 8 different services (if you use Docker) for all the functionality to work.
Ditto on Jellyfin and games. We’ve had a lot of fun with Luanti and Super Tux Kart.
I taught my nieces how to design a basic web page and they loved it. Seeing things change in real time from another language was eye-opening for them.
I run a private pixelfed instance as a sort of family photo archive. Works well enough!
Depending on age/interest there’s stuff like luanti
i love luanti so muchhhhhhhhhh and was so happy to be able to port my minecraft bedrock world over (after a few downgrades and shit)
it is awesome!
TIL, thanks!
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.
You can host for them game servers using Pterodactyl. It has minecraft installed by default and you can find other games here https://github.com/pelican-eggs/eggs , click on games option in the README.md.
I host habitica for the family, that plus jellyfin it’s a start. (Also a Minecraft server)
habitica was my answer to one of the kids wanting a tracking app (they were leaning towards a sobriety themed one)
and wowzers it has really changed my life (a truly decent amount)
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.
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.
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?
