Some ideas for parental controls

[BitcoinPuritan]

First of all, this is an amazing project. Thank you for building it.

It seems great for setting up a private family chatroom, while still being able to connect to the wider world. That connection to the wider world, though, could be an issue where children are involved. Therefore, it would be nice to be able to set up special accounts for children with parental controls.

A few abilities that would be nice:

For a parent account to have the option to require approval to connect to a child account, and the ability to revoke approval,
For a parent account to view a child account’s activity,
For a parent account to freeze/un-freeze/delete/put time restrictions on the child account or on specific contacts or topics,
For a parent account to help with a child account’s password management,
For a parent account to have the option to make the child account visible in the directory only to specific people, and
For the parent/child relationship optionally to be seen in the directory.

These are just a few ideas to make the project more useful to a certain kind of people. I realize they might add a lot of complexity and be a big ask. If this goes beyond the scope of what you’re trying to build, that’s cool too, still an awesome project.

Thanks again, and keep up the great work.

[samuraikid0]

There's already a toggle to hide accounts from same server / outside server contact to be search / add, if you turn it off no one can add/search that person, also right now you need to know the other person server username and server
otherwise you can't add no one without knowing that, it might change in the future, has a discussion about search all servers was discussed, maybe a option in admin page to disable federation search once it gets implemented (can't confirm right now if it is already there)

you just have to ask the children to don't touch that option or if the children activates it ask him to not do it

Password management can be used in the admin page I think can't confirm right now

Cheers !

[balzack]

I see both points. While my kids are young, I don't want them connecting with people I don't know, so all of the parent controls make sense to me.

Currently however the network of nodes is small and accounts can be hidden, so this wouldn't be an urgent feature.

In my mind, as the service grows the parental features will become a requirement, but I have to still add a lot of features to allow the service to grow.

[BitcoinPuritan]

That’s fair, and I agree. There are some other things that I would consider a higher priority (like improving notifications and migrating accounts to a new server). I just wanted to get a few ideas out there while I was thinking about it.

[DMTDimansan]

Thanks a lot to autor of this awesome messenger. I planned to use it at work for communication. I like simple minimalistic design with all in one functionality. Just want to give you respect) and waiting for new features! Thanks!!!

[samuraikid0]

If an admin can turn an account into parental one
what guarantees we have that the private messenger will not turn into spywarecrap ?

[balzack]

I was just thinking the admin could set a list of approved contacts in some admin dashboard for example. I agree that one account shouldn't be able to monitor another account.

I really haven't thought through any of these ideas, but I woudn't proceed with any that violate the whole idea behind this project.