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Comments (132)

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  jshaqaw
  Dead right on twitter. The normies have all left it. Pre Elon Twitter was the community bulletin board and meeting place for all sorts of interesting subgroups. They’ve all left. Normal younger people consider twitter to be as relevant to their lives as Compuserve.My feed there used to be cool physics stuff. Now it’s just all the people in the world who want me dead and for every real one of those 99 bots joining in.
• OhMeadhbh
  I appreciate everyone has a different definition of "minimalism" and that I'm a bit of an outlier. But my version of minimalism includes a) using a dumb phone, b) doing most of my browsing via a text based browser in a terminal and c) I've heard of social media, but don't see the point (though you could argue that maybe the HN comments section is sort of like social media.)Which is not to diminish the author's point (which I interpret as twitter is a cess-pit and think hard about what social media you want to engage in and the interface you want to use.) My point is you don't have to spend time on twitter to benefit from this world-view.
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  privacyishuman
  This is a great blog post. I do a lot of similar things on my phone (GrapheneOS, airplane mode, CoMaps).The thing that I’d been looking for on this minimal setup was a way to prevent access to the browser or installing apps at will. It was easy enough when I was on iOS. I just used Apple Configurator [1] to block Safari and the App Store, but on GrapheneOS, there was no great option.Recently I made a device owner app [2] which allows hiding any UI app and locking itself. It ended up being quite an elegant solution as it allows full access to app stores for updates (new apps you install are hidden until you unlock and approve them). The only way around it is with the lock code or a factory reset.This makes my phone a quite private device whose functionality I intentionally set ahead of time. It can only do what the apps I’ve chosen can do. I prefer browsing and similar on a computer.[1] Apple’s Mac MDM app anyone can use. You need a Mac and to factory reset your phone first.[2] https://beeswax.getflourish.org/
• Shank
  > Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and you can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.It is really interesting to see a third-party client for Twitter still operational. How is this still possible? This seems like an unauthorized third-party hack that would likely get shut down with too much attention?
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  frangonf
  > We need social media less than before, because you can talk to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life).I kinda believe this. The web for collaboration, work, dumping out information and doomscrolling is a great tool, but I think is bad for any kind of socializing or 'communitizing' at a human level, where you are forced to treat humans as such instead of looking at some transduced digital representation of a real person in the form or chars or pixels prone to dehumanization.
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  advis
  I feel like this is... a bit too much, no? Particularly the cellular part. I see the appeal of staying off the grid, but people with families would certainly struggle with this. Not to mention the many inconveniences this would bring about.And using Twitter/X even with a different client... it's not really minimalism is it?I can agree to some extent about the gripes with social media. It's why I prefer using Substack over Twitter, Reddit, etc. It is much more limited, but certainly not as toxic. BlueSky has also been decent in my experience.
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  OroPla
  > Digital MinimalismSounds great.> But it's just using social media less, not using the Internet on your phone and using the CLI moreNever used social media, my phone only gets internet via a cable connection and I only use GUI where the CLI isn't capable enough, like a web browser.Not sure what I was expecting. It's great advice, but kinda preaching to the choir.
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  notpachet
  This is not digital minimism. Digital minimism would be:- Not using social media at all- Not using your phone at all- Not using AI at all
• hollowturtle
  I hope Digital Minimalism doesn't mean depending on an AI product subscription, his written code(which is not minimal) or having a black hole of npm dependencies for running a wallet on the cli that(reporting what's on their repo): "NOTICE: this CLI has NOT BEEN AUDITED and IS UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT and HAS BEEN WRITTEN WITH HELP FROM CLAUDE et al"What a "fantastic" era we're entering into. I think eventually these people will have a minimalistic life, with malware stealing everything
• tkdb
  Agree with the overall sentiment of commenters:Digital minimalism is less time on devices/platforms.This article is more about digital curation, which has value in it's own right.
• ctrlaltdileep
  This really resonates for me. I've gone back and forth on staying on social media given the mental side effects but also how useful it can be. I was on Instagram one day and I noticed that only one in five posts it showed me were from people I actually followed. I found a feature that let met only see stuff from people I followed (Insta makes this hard to find and use) and I felt a lot more at peace when scrolling my feed. Maybe I need to look for a firefly equivalent for it.
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  encomiast
  I guess minimalism is relative. I wouldn’t describe this as minimalism. Minimalism is not using a tool “that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens”. To me that is a way to cope with the opposite of minimalism.You actually can just leave Twitter and read a book instead.
• znpy
  > Twitter (aka X) has always had a strain of toxicity to ittruth is, all most popular platforms have an insane amount of toxicity. it doesn't strictly comes from the platform it self, but from people.
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  satvikpendem
  All these words and no mention of the book where the term comes from, also eponymous, by Cal Newport. His book is about actual digital minimalism versus whatever Vitalik is referencing here.
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  muvlon
  Notably absent: AI minimalism.I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.
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  throwa356262
  I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface Left Facebook and twitter 6-7 years ago. If you just can't leave something without constantly trying to reach back to it in some shape, then you are no different from the junkie that thinks he can quit anytime if he really wanted to.Rant aside, beside social media minimalism I am also a big fan of compute minimalism. I don't use VScode with 100+ plugins or a zsh maxed up with so much bells and whistles that the terminal looks like Christmas and respond with the speed of microsoft powershell.But I guess most people in SF are in the opposite camp.
• bayindirh
  I have skimmed the post but some of the things are not minimalism, but replacement of delivery mechanisms. On the other hand I'm also doing something similar in my digital life.I have reduced my social media to two sites: Here and Mastodon (with a very limited follow circle). I don't follow tons of ad-ridden websites. I have a self-hosted RSS reader, following 10 feeds. Instead of following junk tech news, I read LWN.Next step might be enabling antiproc on HN to reduce my time here, since I added time limits on applications on my phone and love that artificial limit.I have limited energy and I want to focus it instead of spreading it around. Otherwise progressing beyond a certain point becomes impossible.
• liorgrossman
  For me it's less about the tools I use, and more about building health habits (or reducing the bad habits). I use ScreenZen to enforce limited short session for a short list of harmful apps and websites (socials & news), and I configured it to allow a few 5-min-long sessions per day. The short sessions being cut in the middle help me stay informed but break the addictive nature of socials/news. I also use Android's Digital Wellbeing with Bedtime Mode (like Do Not Disturb) and Focus Mode (pause apps and notifications for almost all apps at night). Also uninstalled specific apps (e.g. Facebook) and using the mobile web version, which has subpar experience, which also helps in making it less addictive.
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  keiferski
  Kind of a misleading title. I would call this creating a dashboard through which you interact with social media. Which is a good idea, and conceivably a lot easier to build nowadays with AI. I'd even expand it to the internet at large, using RSS or something like it.Having some kind of notification system would be helpful as well, since most platforms are actively trying to minimize the accounts you follow and replace them with their algorithmic suggestions.
• anon
  undefined
• torben-friis
  Regarding the social media part, hugely recommend revanced, for those in android.My Instagram app (besides showing no ads) shows just the stories and feeds of people I follow, chronologically. Just a couple days this way will make you realize how little content there is, my friend's Korea trip has been the top one for like a couple weeks already.Then you can get the DMs to avoid FOMO and realize how antisocial the whole thing is.No idea if it works for x, I left that long ago and everytime I've checked out of curiosity I've been shocked at the absolute cesspit it is.
• levmiseri
  > ...used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframeI have tried this very same thing on https://grimoire.bio. Large corpus of biological knowledge with detailed visualizations that are shown immediately upon searching, but adding LLM answer when missing/needed.
• tokepi
  See also the 2019 book by Cal Newport, "Digital Minimalism": https://calnewport.com/my-new-book-digital-minimalism/> I propose a philosophy of technology use called digital minimalism in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest.
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  fartfeatures
  This is why I am so careful about what I click and what signals I send to the algorithm. If you don't want to see car crashes then don't rubber neck with morbid curiosity at the first one.I have never seen a Hitler post but if I saw one I would immediately block that user and the algorithm knows that. It doesn't show me people arguing it shows me debates and tech. Because that's what I taught it to do. It is not even hard it just requires a little discipline.When a friend sends a link I refuse to click on it unless my VPN is on and I'm using Mullvad Browser. I don't want their taste (which is quite often look at this outrageous thing) ruining my feed.
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  rr808
  Went to a family reunion and an aunt pulled out a 15 year old Nokia. That's my dream. Unfortunately I need uber and MFAs.
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  itishappy
  > Also, I learned that Toronto has a fraternity (or sorority) that seems to be named after SBF.> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Sigma_Phi> Founded in Abilene Kansas, in 1931...Wow, that's not a leap I would ever have made, let alone posted online. The rest of the article felt similar, like it was well intentioned but maybe somewhat unrelatable: hopping off X by using a different app to read/post, quitting mobile internet by mapping every hotspot in town. Maybe it's relevant more as a break from the author's norm?
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  spaceman_2020
  Every time I read a Vitalik blog post, I end up wondering - how did a thinker so smart and so deep end up creating a technology that’s (now) so crass and shallow
• TacticalCoder
  > If you access a web application, you end up re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click "download") are better than this: you only need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.That's precisely why something like signed distributions packages are way more secure than curl bash'ing.But many simply don't understand that. We had plenty of forged Web certificates likely. And even without that, with curl bash'ing anything sensitive you have to cross fingers that the server ain't serving one in 10 000 request with a backdoored version.With curl bash'ing everybody is trusting every single time that the server ain't compromised or intentionally malicious.At this point I've lost any hope: people simply don't understand security.And as long as we'll have people saying that curl bash'ing is just as safe as signed distros packages, we'll have daily posts about major security incidents.Security is a mindset and most people simply don't have it.
• jcelerier
  just leave twitter for the love of god
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  swiftcoder
  > if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember a particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler... I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interfaceYou know, it really is entirely optional to hang out at the Nazi bar.> A phone connected to cell is an always-on tracking deviceA phone connected to wifi is also an always-on tracking device. You can't really escape this without removing the "phone" part of the equation
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  komali2
  > Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...
• kalenkilgore
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• thepieuvre
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• kaiwen1
  X is the only social media I use, and I use it a lot. I’ve never seen a Hitler or a Mao post. My feed is saturated with my intellectual interests. It’s a joy to use, filled with novel discoveries that I often want learn more about.Getting this experience is simple: don’t click or garbage, occasionally block content you don’t like.