At the same time, I understand how important it is for kids to explore the internet on their own.

No more though. It's more important that they spend time at the fresh air & play. The internet has become pretty useless outside of wikipedia & social media, and social media has become pretty toxic outside of a few spots (like we can hopefully keep lemmy).

• everything is ridden with ads
• news websites locked behind paywalls
• news websites reporting agenda-driven propaganda
• major email providers auto-classify emails from smaller providers as spam (despite correct SPF entries)
• every good service that is not decentralized, eventually gets hit by enshittification due reap profits

I would absolutely support a 100% social media ban for all centralized networks (corporation controlled). Because they are used not only to damage the brains of children, but those of adults as well (see Eastern German elections). Only federated chat systems / social media should be allowed. But that's where our fascist overlords have a conflict of interest - they desperately want to see everything we communicate - and chat control (literally, fuck you EU) is not possible in federated networks.

The True Problem, is that an actual-safe-space is required, for kids,

& that costs investment to produce, & to maintain.

We pay for kindergarten & schools to be safe-spaces, don't we?

Children's forming brains require healthy place, right?

Same is required for internet, for them.

So, a "walled garden" with wikipedia ( not the gore-centered stuff, & there seems to be some of that on there ), & TVTropes,

etc, is required for them to develop their minds healthy,

but the only "successful" walled-gardens were made with machiavellian intent, thus-far..

Apple's walled-garden, Microsoft's, AOL's, Google's, etc..

Nobody's done a not-for-profit edition for humanitarian reasons..

Big Tech'd sabotage it any way they could, in order to "prove" it "doesn't work"

( it'll never be seen in Google News, Facebook may well disappear all references to it, Apple wouldn't permit it on their platform's App Store, etc.. )

Exterminating-alternative is required when the stakes are world-possession, right?

NO competitor allowed, right??

Nobody's got the spine to create the required walled-garden which simultaneously gives children

• access to meaningful friends

• lots of learning opportunities & learning-means

• gamefied learning, like projects-done-together on interesting-to-them subjects, with real accomplishings, like Science Fairs can be, irl

• systematic stomping of abuse, predators, bullying, etc..

• systematic training them in sane privacy-habits, device-health habits ( update your apps weekly! Reboot your device weekly! Use antivirus! )

• systematically training all children in critical-thinking, dismantling ideology-programming as completely as possible, from the next-generation

etc.

& if anybody did have the spine, then it'd be force-disallowed by Big Tech.

Humankind waited too long to care, & now the bad-guys own the whole "game", it looks like, to me..

Human children never will know what honest, proper, supportive systematic-development through interesting challenges, & safe growing-up can be, because our-generations wouldn't do what was required, when we had leverage to be able to do it.

"fighting over crumbs" is all that's left, it looks like..

( lobbied "representatives" wouldn't allow world-integrity to violate their owners' interests, either, obviously.. )

Sorry for my bitterness, but I'm old.

_ /\ _