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.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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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.
Ditto on Jellyfin and games. We've had a lot of fun with Luanti and Super Tux Kart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I host habitica for the family, that plus jellyfin it's a start. (Also a Minecraft server)
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?
Mine are too little for now for much more but I have gotten them successfully to use our Emby server for videos and music. Calling that a win.
Excellent question! Commenting to follow.