I use Libretube as my kids’ YouTube app. It uses piped instances to stream the videos, and you can pick the instance that works best for you. I’m wondering if there are any Instances that can be used to totally block all NSFW searches, thumbnails, and videos. Do you know of any other apps, ways, or ideas to make YouTube safer for kids? Let me know in the comments!
In my experience the only way is to never let your young child watch youtube unsupervised.
I think it’s best not to have kids find entertainment on the internet because they will get exposed to stuff you don’t want them to see cause its basically impossible to quickly catch all horrible stuff especially the sneaky stuff without being very restrictive like a approval process.
Neither Piped, Invidious, LibreTube, nor NewPipe have this option:
- Invidious: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/2908#issuecomment-1046999164
- Piped doesn’t have any issue about it
- LibreTube already uses Piped so
- NewPipe: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/1950
The only thing I found is an app called SkyTube that has a Deny List and an Allow List.
I think it’s an uphill battle with this. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who make fucked up videos and advertises it to children (Elsagate). If YouTube can’t handle this, then I don’t know how can this be solved by the community.
As a father myself, I wouldn’t recommend this route. Even YouTube has/had some inappropriate content on their kids app (think of ElsaGate), and they have many employees and automated systems in place.
Your safest bet is to self host and only allow or upload videos you vet yourself. That, or supervised screen time.
