I have a preteen with a tablet and got tired of the YouTube rabbit hole problem. He's too old for YouTube Kids but too young for the regular YouTube app — and there's nothing in between. YouTube Kids is full of weird algorithmic slop, and regular YouTube's algorithm will drag him into brainrot within minutes. Standing over his shoulder doesn't scale.

So I built BrainRotGuard. The kid gets a simple web page where they can search and request videos. Each request pings me on Telegram with the thumbnail, title, channel, and duration. I tap Approve or Deny. If approved, it starts playing on their tablet automatically. It will also populate his "feed" with approved channel videos, essentially YOU control of the algorithm.

The key trick: you block youtube.com at the DNS level (Pi-hole, AdGuard, pfBlockerNG) and only allow youtube-nocookie.com embeds. So even the "suggested videos" overlay at the end of a video leads nowhere — those links point to blocked youtube.com.

My kid actually prefers it over YouTube itself. The UI is simpler and less distracting — no endless scrolling, no autoplay, no algorithmic recommendations pulling them down a rabbit hole. They search, pick a video, watch it, done.

It runs on a Proxmox LXC with 1 CPU and 2GB RAM — it barely sips resources. Anything you have lying around could run it.

Some things the HN crowd might find interesting:

- No YouTube API key needed — uses yt-dlp for search and metadata - No ads, no autoplay, no algorithmic recommendations - Channel allowlisting — approve a whole channel so individual videos auto-approve - Category-based time limits (edu vs fun) with daily budgets - Scheduled access windows (e.g., no YouTube before 8am or after 7pm) - Self-hosted, runs on any Docker box on your LAN - No accounts, no cloud dependency — just a Telegram bot token - No phone-home hooks, no centralized data — everything stays on your network

I'm sharing this because I'm hoping other parents can use it to protect their kids too. It's free and open source.

Full disclosure: I'm not a developer — just a dad with a homelab who wanted to solve this problem. I built the whole thing with Claude. I described features, Claude wrote the code. I never touched a line myself. Every release went through security and code reviews via Claude before pushing. The project is about a week old. If that interests (or terrifies) you, happy to talk about the process.

GitHub: https://github.com/GHJJ123/brainrotguard

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the DNS blocking setup.

I like it. What I would like actually, is a way to whitelist YouTube channels so that they can only play those channels on the YouTube app. Think that is possible?

Iv also been battling youtube for my kids. I have another solution called Channel Lab on iOS.