Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

This is great stuff, Harry. Congratulations on the launch.

Since you're asking for it, a request that I have is if there was a mobile-OS wide implementation of it, that'd be great. I've tried launchers like https://getsiempo.com (defunct?) and https://lessphone.app but walked away unimpressed due to a variety of reasons: The main one being having to change habits to adopt to the new UX, whilst solutions like blloc [0] look appealing from far-out, they need equal amount of buy-in. That said, I am all for zero-config solutions.

A personal hack, I want to share: I exclusively use distractive websites from the browser (no installing "fast", "always-on" apps), and I force clear cookies everytime tabs are closed.

That means, I'm forced to login to view any new comments, likes, messages, or notifications and that is enough of a detterent and an annoyance that I don't feel the urge to seek validation often by rechecking on number of upvotes, likes, or replies of the trails I leave on various social media websites like news.yc (which is amongst the cleanest social media websites out there, in that it doesn't employ any dark patterns to lure you in, but that karma count must keep going up, right? #growth-mindset).

Coming back to mobile, on Android, Google's digital well-being initiative [1] has help kick-start competing implementations. I particularly like OnePlus' version of it-- the Zen Mode [2]-- It requires no setup or configuration and simply learns to know what's causing distraction, shows you a pop-up warning about too much usage, and if enabled, it simply goes nuclear and denies access to the phone for 20m.

I'll keep an eye-out for Firefox and/or Brave versions of Motion. Any idea on timelines for those?

[0] https://www.blloc.com

[1] https://wellbeing.google

[2] https://www.androidcentral.com/oneplus-explains-how-and-why-...

Thank you so much for sharing these tips and suggestions on mobile. Mobile is definitely on our todo list, more so Android than iPhone. Like you mentioned, Android's digital well-being initiative helps better products emerge. Unfortunately, Apple still does not allow developer access to screen time functionatlities, and the only way to mimic that is through MDM, which not only is a bad workaround but also has been banned by Apple.

I find your personal hack on mobile to be very useful myself too - I found myself to be so much less stressed and more productive after uninstalling apps like Facebook and Reddit on my phone, and disabling notifications on nearly all other apps. When I need to use Facebook, I would go to my computer.

What about a DNS based approach on iOS? You don't need MDM, just a VPN extension. You could send push notifications when your DNS server detects a site to block and mimic the same UX you have with a browser extension.

You are correct - that would work to send reminders (notifications). However, we wouldn't be able to prevent people from using their apps. This is definitely something we are considering.

Love the idea. Absolutely needed. You should at least offer the VPN solution, even if it's not as feature rich as the desktop extension.

The desktop problem is pretty solvable for programmers. I wrote a simple bash script to add/remove blocked sites to /etc/hosts. I mapped that script to aliases 'focus' and 'distract' that block and unblock sites, respectively (requiring the root password). Finally, I set up a root cron job that runs 'focus' every hour during desired time windows (for me that's morning until late evening on Mon-Sat inclusive).

That system works exceedingly well, but I can't port it to iOS.

Right now I use Lockdown (VPN-based) with a block list and it works okay, except when I want to unlock by disabling the firewall. There's no automatic reenable option making the whole system less effective. I considered writing my own VPN-based system but haven't got around to it. Would love to see Motion tackle it.

Thanks. Yes - it's definitely an area we will tackle very soon. We just recently got our extension to a state where people are finding it useful; we plan on using our learnings on desktop and apply them to mobile.

You could effectively block the network connectivity for them though by mapping domains to 127.0.0.1. Why wouldn't that be just as good? nextdns.io does a really good job of running such a service.

> nextdns.io does a really good job of running such a service.

It is not trivial to build, run, and operate a nextdns-esque service. The founders, Olivier and Romain, are some of the world's best at what they do, imo.

That said, a client-side DNS re-write solution might be relatively cheaper to implement and might even be a tad-easier than deploying an global DNS resolver with per-user custom configurations and endpoints.

Agreed; it's definitely not trivial. We will definitely tackle mobile very soon, and this is a potential solution. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion - yes that is definitely something we've thought about and will possibly implement. We'll be tackling the mobile problem soon, and we hope to use our learnings from desktop to find the most effective solution in mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com