How I rid myself of short form mediaWhy

I’m 22, I’ve grown up with social media, whether it be instagram, tiktok, x (formally twitter), snapchat or youtube I’ve used them extensively.

Having spent - I estimate around 13,104 hours on social media I witnessed my usage change, when I started I would post on snapchat, instagram, etc and regularly view my feed of friends & family, though as “the years” went by, whether it be negative comments on posts, or the ever dreading algorithm, I stopped posting.

But as my posting reduced, my usage did not, and my 13,104 hour estimate assumes four hours of usage per day, when I decided to try and rid myself of it ( almost a year ago!) I was averaging more than that.

Anyway none of the previous text really explains why, I felt like it was becoming a parasite on my life, sucking my precious time away and no longer being the place I spoke to friends, as I had other platforms for that (whatsapp). It became a place to consume. A place where I turned off my brain, let the bits and bobs of the algorithm decide not even if I laughed, but if I found it of “accepting funniness” to send to a friend.

The final straw was when I did some basic maths.

6 hours of usage, ~16 hours of waking time. 37.5% of my waking life. THIRY SEVEN POINT FIVE PERCENT. Or in other words, 25% of my life. Now this maths makes quite a few assumptions, that I could even keep up 6 hours of screen time, that I continued to use it until death, etc etc etc. But alas I did my mathematics and decided it had to do.

Failed attempts

Deleting the app!

My initial attempt was silly, but yes I just deleted the apps.<br>Then, I had to check an instagram group chat about something on my university course, then I redeleted it… and repeat maybe 3x ?

I then had a bright! idea, what if instead of redownloading the app every time to check one message, I just didn’t use the app bar checking the messages ?

So I tried, and failed! T’was but a short time before my usage was back up.

Screen time limits

Ah yes, screen time limits, available on apple and android. Apple has a nicer approach comparitively to android it works as such:

Create a screen time limit

Usage is used up

A screen comes up saying your time limit is up

click “more options” (iirc)

click “allow for the day”

Android is:

Create a limit

Time limit is up

Go to settings

No option for allowing for the day

Extend by 15 minutes and “remember” to decrease it tomorrow

I believe apple’s approach is better, simply because a day of increased usage keeps your limit at the set value for the proceeding days, android’s requires an increase in limit, or deletion of sai dlimit.

Ask me how many times I decreased it the day after…. 1hr limits went from 1 to 1.25, to 1.5 etc until I forgot about it for the next attempt to reduce my limit.

Neither of these attempts worked, nor did they do anything in all honesty.

NextDNS to the rescue

NextDNS, a paid dns for approx 1.79GBP monthly (2.41 freedom units), I hear you cry “but what about self hosting!”.<br>No, I already host my:

git server

obsidian database

music library

movie/show library

photo library

backup / sync family member photos

etc etc etc +10 random services

but I draw the line at DNS, I don’t want to figure out how to set my Tailscale dns to an IP in the 100 range, wonder why my “WiFi”(dns) is so slow, etc etc. Nor do I want to find myself having to point at the shirt of shame when something inevitably goes wrong.

So my initial attempt involved blocking social media ( more specifically instagram, tiktok) on the DNS level, enabled in the tailscale app I always had on.

Why didn’t this work ? Well you see, I am in control of the DNS, I am but the master of my own electronics, the reason I haven’t asked a family member/friend to control the password to my screentime limit - is because I am a control freak about electronics. I’m a software dev, the computer does what I tell it to, it’s like my whole job…

So after enabling, disabling, turning off tailscale etc etc I decided to turn the DNS off permanently “just incase” as “what if” I missed a notification from that group chat. Dear reader it didn’t exactly end well.

What worked

NextDNS ! Yes yes, I know I just said that it didn’t work, but it did for me in one specific configuration, you see NextDNS has a “parental control” mode that does what it says on the tin:

Set a period for each day of the week during which some of the websites, apps, games or categories above will not be blocked — e.g. allow Facebook on Mondays and Tuesdays between 6pm and 8pm.

Yes dear reader, the answer was allowing it sometimes, so for me I blocked all social media use on all hours bar mid-day to 6pm.

yeah that’s all there is to it, I simply allowed myself to use it during a finite period, and my usage plummeted, eventually becoming so small I did delete the apps, and didn’t notice :)

Dear reader, you may recall that instagram group chat I referred to earlier, the one I...