If you have someone who you trust deeply and who cares about you, consider setting parental locks on each other’s devices. On iOS and macOS it’s dead simple to set up. The Lenten season is coming up and my wife and I have decided to both give up social media completely until Easter. Much like celebrating Christmas is a good time for goodwill, it can be a good season to try giving up something you feel is not good for you.
I’ve decided I’m going to spend my free time using making a ground up point and click adventure game with my kids. We spent about two hours on it this weekend and my girls (six and ten) were howling with laughter. It’s cool to see my oldest drawing up plans for what she wants each room of the game to look like, and what she wants to be able to do. All very exciting and new. GitHub copilot makes making it almost trivial, just spun up vite with typescript, created a canvas element, and off to the races.
I was never addicted to social media, but I used to be terribly addicted to YouTube. I tried various blockers, and none of that worked. In the end I told myself I'm going to quit for 1 month and see. It's a long enough period, where you can't just distract yourself with other things, but it's not long enough to feel like you're losing something. Not to preach, but it worked for me, and I've applied it successfuly in other places like eating habits. You commit to 1 thing at a time, and see if it makes your life better.
And what happened after? Did you stop using YouTube altogether or you can now moderate your usage?
I did a similar experiment quitting YouTube and reddit for a month last year. By the end of the month I didn't feel like I missed it much and thought that it wasn't a problem for me anymore. Unfortunately, with time my usage started to ramp up again.
YouTube is still useful, so I didn't cut it out completely. I have an RSS feed for channels I'm interested in, and sometimes the only good search result is a video. The feed is for noise control only. I find that I now negatively associate impulsive YouTube consumption, and I'm conscious of when it happens, so I catch myself almost immediately.
If your usage ramps up, and you catch yourself scrolling for the sake of distraction, then don't beat yourself up, just repeat the process. I'm sure I'll need a reminder too.
> and I've applied it successfully in other places
There is a positive effect to quitting without too many crutches or aids. Not so much that you learn how to do it, but that you realise that it can be done, it's not that bad and it will make your life better.
I agree. If you need to set something up (like a DNS sinkhole) to trick yourself (and you know how to disable it to get back to scrolling), it'll take actual willpower to truly stop.
Nice writeup. Was this built to be used with multiple devices? IIRC at least older jailbroken iDevices let you modify /etc/hosts, which you can use for the same purpose of blocking specific sites.
1. Why an ESP32? Its a bit of an odd duck I would think. Can it withstand a month of DNS bombardment from your phone?
2. As the wifi credentials are part of the code, and its set up as a station, this is only going to work at home without port forwards? Leads me back to point 1 sort of. Its an ultraportable lightweight DNS server you need to recompile to move.
Its a cool implementation it just sort of comes off as a solution seeking a problem.
I deleted social media apps (IG, TikTok, Reddit, etc.) from my phone a few weeks ago (about two weeks ago perhaps).
The only one that I wish could be deleted is YouTube (because of YT Shorts), which comes with every Android. For now, I've restricted my usage using the App Timers feature.
WhatsApp Statuses sadly cannot be disabled. I wish I could fully delete WhatsApp for good[0]. Telegram Statuses feel wholesome. I admit I have a pet peeve with how Meta engineered WhatsApp after purchase.
I'm not feeling any withdrawal symptoms of any sort. If everything continues to be like this, I'm looking forward to finishing 2025 like this. I've been looking at dumb phones, E-Ink ones seem promising, but not yet quite there. Maybe also drop in a dumb Casio watch.
I did not delete my social media accounts, as I don't want anyone grabbing my public handles and wreaking havoc. I will always reserve these, even for leaving them empty.
> For the uninitiated, doomscrolling is essentially when one passively scrolls through endless feeds of content on social media until eventually stopping to realize that they've wasted the last five minutes of their life doing something entirely unproductive.
"Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media."
In other words, doomscrolling is about scrolling the bad news, specifically. Like covid-19 or war.
If you read the 2nd paragraph of the very article you cited, you'll also see it says:
"Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping."
It won’t. Especially when you use private relay on an iPhone, it won’t use local DNS (except if the requested domain isn’t found, it can probably still route local domain names?).
With 'normal' DNS, UDP with the default and TCP is used if the packet size becomes too large. There are other TCP-only variants such as DoT (DNS over TLS) and DoH (DNS over HTTPS).
I don't think the performance would matter much with some basic caching (or even just OS-level caching), but there is limited memory in an ESP so maybe that is it. I have never noticed issues with DoT and DoH which are theoretically much heavier protocols.
That’s odd because DNS is the quintessential UDP-based protocol. “From the time of its origin in 1983 the DNS has used the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for transport over IP.”. DNS over TCP was only introduced as a later addition (admittedly, in 1989).
I built something very similar to this too, but in Go. My motivation was that running Pi Hole was just way over complicated for something that should be simple and light weight.
* Fetches block lists every 6 hours
* Gets DNS requests over DoH then serves as DNS over the VPN.
* A single Go binary, so it's exceptionally easy to run.
It was super interesting to play around and get working as a side project, and as a plus debugging deadlocks in a DNS application is always fun /s
I’ve decided I’m going to spend my free time using making a ground up point and click adventure game with my kids. We spent about two hours on it this weekend and my girls (six and ten) were howling with laughter. It’s cool to see my oldest drawing up plans for what she wants each room of the game to look like, and what she wants to be able to do. All very exciting and new. GitHub copilot makes making it almost trivial, just spun up vite with typescript, created a canvas element, and off to the races.
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