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Comment by schindlabua | Hacker News Reader

My policy is to decrease on push notifications as far as possible. WhatsApp and Telegram still have the privilege but that's it. I feel like by seeking out information rather than it coming to me, I at least am making a conscious decision to waste time on social media.

Interestingly, implementing that had the effect of me now spending hardly any time on there at all. Funny how that works!

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Yeah I've been doing much the same, I've given mastodon a pass for now for direct mentions only (which tootdon lets you configure) because those notifications are people's actual interactions with me - whereas with Twitter and Facebook it's generally any old crap that happens to one of my friends or follows, or sometimes even somebody else who some people I know have followed (who cares?!) so that gets turned right off. In fact I don't even have the Facebook app, I just look at it in my browser - sometimes it still manages to sneak a few notifications through Chrome even though I was sure I turned those off.

Mostly it's just very annoying when for some reason my phone doesn't manage to prioritise push messages which come from direct messages or SMS and so they somehow manage to get buried under a honking slew of social media detritus.

My websockets for my mastodon instance were broken due to a screwup in my nginx configuration, so for the first several weeks I ran it, I didn't even get browser notifications (mastodon's web UI is pretty good at falling back to polling).

It is quite different getting an alert popup now. I should probably go back to disabling them.

I’ve started leaving DND mode on 24/7. I go to my notifications, they don’t come to me anymore. This also prevents your iPhone from being DOS’d by a phone call at any moment.

I'm doing the same (on Android, and push notification is broken anyway on microG). Sometimes I get 'anonymous' phone calls. Those are annoying. But people who know me, know I prefer e-mail etc.

That's a great point. I went into the Android settings, pressed the toggle to disable all notifications, then went through and re-enabled the few necessary apps (text messenger, Spotify, etc).

It helped immensely.

Something I did in addition to removing push notifications was deleting the apps. When I want to look at a Reddit thread or a tweet, I have to use my mobile browser, and endure their painful UI. Some might consider this paranoid or masochistic, but I find that for me it prevents further exploration beyond the thread/tweet I was originally interested in.

This is how I cured my reddit-addiction. I also decided never to visit Facebook with my phone. Now I visit there once a day in the evening. These actions have increased my happiness significantly.

I’m really glad to see your comment. You control your phone, it doesn’t control you.

I've turned off all push notifications except calls and texts as well. It seems the internet has become way too much "push" and not enough "pull"

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