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.
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 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.
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.
> 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?
The advantage is that it is really, really cheap and low power.
They are cheap enough that I keep a supply of ESP boards just in case I want to throw something together.
Yup, that’s the reason! Had one lying around my house (I’d originally bought a pack of them at a really cheap price)!
Great project. Use what you have is as good as any reason.
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.
I'm fine with HN being my social media.
--
[0]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/goodbye-whatsapp
All Android apps can be disabled, even if they can't be uninstalled.
You're right, though I consider that the workaround and not the actual solution.
Also, some apps cannot be disabled depending on the vendor. e.g.: Weather (which launches random notifications from time to time), Radio, etc.
Could you not just set this up on the router itself?
I live in an apartment, so this unfortunately wasn’t an option for me!
> 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.
This is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling
"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:
[citation needed] :)
How's gonna work if the request is already cached or when using DNS over https?
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?).
Neat idea, but my takeaway is I had no idea that DNS also runs on UDP/53.. I always thought it was TCP only! #TIL
The author cites it as performance reasons, but at this scale, even the uplink to cloudflare, would be negligible, no?
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).
Huh, I didn't know it had a TCP option, I thought it was UDP-only.
> I always thought it was TCP only!
So did the NIH firewall administrator:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229201
There is a setting in YT to disable shorts.
There is not, but you can use a uBlock Origin filter.
How? I've looked for this in the past and it wasn't a feature...
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