Vitalik Buterin ditched X's algorithm and put his phone on airplane mode for 100 days
Digital Minimalism
Vitalik Buterin describes two personal experiments in digital minimalism. He kept using X but switched to the Firefly multi-client, which lacks the algorithmic feed, and felt noticeably better. He also spent 100 days with his phone permanently on airplane mode for privacy and mental peace, relying on CoMaps and public wifi. He recommends others scope their social media use to escape the vortex.
I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- OroPla
> Digital Minimalism
Sounds great.
> But it's just using social media less, not using the Internet on your phone and using the CLI more
Never 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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