So it’ll end up being a platform of trolls and bigots just screaming into the void and paying for the privilege. What a fabulous idea.

Typora also supports it, it’s a great low-overhead tool overall.

There are degrees of monitoring. This is basically my approach:

• no smartphone before 12yrs old
• no computer, tablet, smartphone or similar in their bedroom before 16yrs old, specifically at night.
• family link (android) installed, with tighter controls the younger they are. This is discussed and also explained as a measure to protect them
• if they are under 16, we create social media accounts together and discuss what is appropriate, what can/should be public/private etc.

That is basically it. A lot of it is being around, available and approachable. It’s not perfect, but it has several layers of protection, and is built around creating trust and teaching valuable media skills.

If I had to pick one, I’d say the ‘no internet devices in bedrooms’ would be the most valuable one. Because of that, I know what games my kids play, they can deconnect at night, and it’s fairly easy to enforce.

Yeah, but not models that are trained on data that raises copyright concerns, which is currently the case.

‘People’ in this respect are also the owners of media sites.

The larger danger is the erosion of kids’ privacy. People are so panicked about all the dangers out there, and there are so many monitoring tools available to parents and educators, that it’s no wonder that kids develop trust issues and/or are afraid to take up responsability.

I say this as a dad of two teenagers: the kids are allright. Love them, hug them, talk to them, show interest in their lives. Don’t use surveillance as a substitute.

Taking the logic too far, I think. There is also a business interest in selling you storage and storage devices, it’s not just Hollywood calling the shots.

Of course, in a totalitarian system (North Korea style) the ownership of storage media will probably be tightly regulated and controlled, but that’s a wholly different scenario.

Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.

There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.

I actually don’t know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don’t think works very well.

I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn’t be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.