2025-10-13 21:04:00
I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day1, with South Africans coming in fourth highest in the world at a whopping 5 hours and 11 minutes2.
This figure seems really high to me. If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day, that means that one third of their day is spent on their phones. If we also assume people work 8 hours per day (ignoring the fact that they may be using their phones during work hours), that suggests that people spend over half of their free time (and up to 65% of it) glued to their screens.
I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It's too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention. I've tried switching to old-school black and white phones before, but always begrudgingly returned to using a smartphone due to the utility of it. The problem, however, is that it comes with too many attention sinks tucked in alongside the useful tools.
I care about living an intentional and meaningful life, nurturing relationships, having nuanced conversations, and enjoying the world around me. I don't want to spend this limited time I have on earth watching short form video and getting into arguments on Twitter.
This is what I enjoy. Picture taken yesterday in Scarborough, South Africa.
I've written at length about how I manage my digital consumption, from turning off notifications to forgoing social media entirely. The underlying premise here is that if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.
We're wired to seek out distraction, novel information, and entertainment, and avoid boredom at all costs. But boredom is where creativity and self-reflection do their best work. It's why "all the best ideas come when you're in the shower"—we don't usually take our phones with us into the shower (yet).
According to Screen Time on my iPhone, on average I spend 30 minutes per day on it, which I think is reasonable, especially considering the most-used apps are by-and-large utility apps like banking and messages. This isn't because I have more self-control than other people. I don't think I do. It's because I know myself, and have set up my digital life to be a positive force, and not an uninspired time-sink.
There are many apps and systems to incentivise better relationships with our phones, mostly based around time limits. But these are flawed in three ways:
The only way I've found to have a good relationship with my phone is to make it as uninteresting as possible. The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or visit them in-browser. However some people have found that having them on a dedicated device works by isolating those activities. Something like a tablet at home that is "the only place you're allowed to use Instagram". I can't comment too much on this route, but it seems reasonable.
My biggest time sink over the past few years has been YouTube. The algorithm knew me too well and would recommend video after engaging, but ultimately useless video. I could easily burn an entire evening watching absolute junk—leaving me feeling like I'd just wasted what could have otherwise been a beautiful sunset or a tasty home-cooked lasagne. However, at the beginning of this year I learnt that you can turn off your YouTube watch history entirely, which means no recommendations. Here's what my YouTube home screen now looks like:
Without the recommendations I very quickly run out of things to watch from the channels I'm subscribed to. It's completely changed my relationship with YouTube since I only watch the videos I actually want to watch, and none of the attention traps. You can turn off your YouTube watch history here, and auto delete your other Google history (like historic searches and navigation) here, which I think is just good practice.
I also used my adblocker, AdGuard on Safari which has a useful "block element" feature, to block the recommended videos on the right of YouTube videos. I use this feature to hide shorts as well, since I have no interest in watching them either, and YouTube intentionally makes them impossible to remove. If you're interested in a similar setup, here are the selectors I use to block those elements:
youtube.com###items > ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer:last-child
youtube.com###sections
youtube.com##[is-shorts]
youtube.com###secondary
The only media that I do sometimes consume on my phone are my RSS feeds, but it's something I'm completely comfortable with since it's explicitly opt-in by design and low volume.
While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing. Over time, I find myself checking my phone less and less. Sometimes I notice the urge, and just let it go, instead focusing on the here and now.
I think that while the attention-span-degrading effects of recommendation media are getting most of the headlines, what isn't spoken about as much is the sheer number of hours lost globally to our phones (3.8 million years per day, according to my back-of-the-napkin-math). And while people may argue that this could involve productive work or enjoyable leisure, I suspect that the vast (vast!) majority of that time is short-form entertainment.
My solution may sound overkill to many people, but I can say with absolute certainty that it has turned me into a more present, less distracted, and more optimistic person. I have much more time to spend in nature, with friends, or on my hobbies and projects. I can't imagine trading it in for a tiny screen, ever.
Give it a try.
Happily on the beach for sunset.
2025-10-03 15:30:00
Most people who read my blog and know me for the development of Bear Blog are surprised to learn that I have another software project in the art and design space. It's called JustSketchMe and is a 3D modelling tool for artists to conceptualise their artwork before putting pencil to paper.
It's a very niche tool (and requires some serious explanation to some non-illustrators involving a wooden mannequin and me doing some dramatic poses), however when provided as a freemium tool to the global population of artists, it's quite well used.
Similar to Bear, I make it free to everyone, with the development being funded through a "pro" tier. Conversely, since it is a standalone app it has a bit of a weakness, which is what this post is about.
I noticed, back in 2021, that when Googling "justsketchme" the top 3 autocompletes were "justsketchme crack", "justsketchme pro cracked", and "justsketchme apk". On writing this post, I checked that this still holds true, and it's fairly similar 4 years later.
The meaning of this is obvious. A lot of people are trying to pirate JustSketchMe. However, instead of feeling frustrated (okay, I did feel a bit frustrated at first) I had a bright idea to turn this apparent negative into a positive.
I created two pages with the following titles and the appropriate subtitles to get indexed as a pirate-able version of JustSketchMe:
These pages rank as the first result on Google for the relevant search terms. Then on the page itself I tongue-in-cheek call out the potential pirate. I then acknowledge that we're in financially trying times and give them a discount code.
And you know what?
That discount code is the most used discount code on JustSketchMe! By far! No YouTube sponsor, nor Black Friday special even comes close.
In some ways this is taking advantage of a good search term. In others it's showing empathy and adding delight, creating a positive incentive to purchase to someone who otherwise wouldn't have.
The discount code is PIRACYKILLS. I'll leave it active for a while. 👮🏻♂️
2025-09-19 17:45:00
Hi everyone,
Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update.
I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf, which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so soon felt daunting.
I've made two Bear t-shirts for the conference. One light and one dark mode—inspired by the default Bear theme. Let's see if anyone notices!
If you live in Istanbul and want to grab coffee, I'm keen! If you've previously travelled to Istanbul and have recommendations for me, please pop me an email. I have a few days to explore the city.
I received so many great emails from people about my post on slow social media. There are many great projects underway at the moment, and many great projects that unfortunately didn't make it. Some notable standouts to me:
Unfortunately no longer with us:
Here are some projects that are up-and-running. These aren't necessarily all "social networks", nor necessarily viable at scale, but each of them has an element or two that makes them interesting.
There were many other projects in various states of development that I haven't had the time to fully explore yet, but I'll get to them over the next week or so.
Somehow my post about the change in the Bear source code license exploded on Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, and Reddit, and has been read over 120,000 times.
The vast majority of the emails and responses I received were positive, but about 10% of the Hacker News crowd got really mean about it without taking the time to understand the context. I guess I can't expect empathy from 120,000 people.
Regardless, if you're interested in reading about the controversy The Grizzly Gazette covered it quite well.
While I don't feed the trolls on Hacker News (and find comments to be a pretty poor place to have nuanced discussions in general), I'd like to respond to a few of the main critiques here.
While Bear (the platform) has a community—and a very good one at that; the source-code part of Bear has never been community oriented. Bear doesn't accept code contributions and the code has been written by me personally. I have not engaged in the exploitation of free developer labour, nor used it being open-source as marketing material.
I suspect that these kinds of comments arose from the (justified, but ultimately misguided) assumption that the Bear project had active contributors and a community surrounding the code itself.
Yes, I shouldn't have released Bear on an MIT license in the beginning. I didn't even think about licenses when I launched Bear in 2020 and just used the default. I also didn't expect free-ride competition to be an issue in this space. So, this is a justifiable criticism, even if it feels like it was made in bad faith.
This was a common criticism, but fails to resolve the main reason for this change: people forking and hosting a clone of Bear under a new name, social elements and all. The AGPLv3 license only specifies that they would need to release their version of the code under the same license. This doesn't dissuade free-ride competition, at least not in this context.
Bear's source code was never meant to be used by people to set up competing services to Bear. It was there to ensure that people understand what's going on under the hood, and to make the platform auditable. I specify this in the CONTRIBUTIONS.md that was last updated 2 years ago.
In summary, Bear is a platform, not a piece of self-hostable software. I think these criticisms are justified sans-context. With context, I don't think the same arguments would have been made. But Hacker News is well known for nasty comments based on the title of the post alone.
Aaand we're done! Lots of updates. Please feel free to email me your thoughts, recommendations, or anything else. If you haven't dug through my past posts, here're a few lesser-read posts that I enjoyed writing:
If you haven't subscribed to my blog, you can do it via the RSS feed or email.
Have a goodie!
2025-09-16 17:44:00
People often assume that I hate social media. And they'd be forgiven for believing that, since I am overtly critical of current social media platforms and the effects they have on individuals and society; and deleted all of my social media accounts back in 2019.
However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about.
It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.
Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability.
Imagine that, society and politics are on the rocks all so a fitness influencer can sell you their "Abs in 30 days" training program.
These platforms are the quintessential poster child for late-stage capitalism.
Okay, now that we've established what the problems with current platforms are—what would a non-evil social media platform look like?
I'd love to see everyone running a blog, and subscribing to the people they care about via RSS. But unfortunately this doesn't scale since it requires effort to put your thoughts down in writing longer than 255 characters. I have many friends who don't even know I have a blog, or what an RSS reader is.
So while everyone blogging may be the ideal we can aspire to, let's design a hypothetical social media platform that takes the good aspects of current social media, while creating pro-social incentives.
The platform should be about:
The platform should NOT be about:
In my opinion, as soon as there is the ability for commercial interests to take hold, they will. The "follow" mechanism is a key part of that. I propose that instead of followers we should regress back to the "friend" or "connection" system where there is a symmetric relationship where both people have to agree to the connection. There is no good reason to have "followers" on a platform that is trying to improve relationships. "Following" is purely for egotistical or financial gain and breeds parasocial relationships.
I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
This feature alone already removes 90% of the marketing interests in the platform. Do you want to make a connection, but are maxed out? You'll need to unfriend someone first.
The second necessary element would be a chronological feed with posts from your connections. This turns the platform from an engagement engine into a way to keep up with what everyone else is doing, but importantly, gives you a natural "end" to the feed when you start seeing posts you've already viewed. This way when you start scrolling there's an explicit stopping point.
Relatedly, pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going. Infinite-scroll is such an obvious user-trap, and I view any website doing it as not having its user's best interests at heart.
And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting. This will keep the feed reasonably populated without one or two people completely overwhelming it.
The rest of the platform can be optimised to be as easy-to-use as possible. Something like a mixture between the old Instagram and Twitter, with comments and reactions. No reels or any other recommendation system to keep people engaged to death. And no analytics, since that would be optimising for reach and engagement instead of the stated goal of connection.
Do I expect a platform like this to succeed? Not by the traditional metrics of success. In the real world it would exist alongside the content mills, which are exciting by design and competing for attention. Could it work in niche groups, or amongst intentional people who are sick of the current platforms? Maybe.
Naturally, a project like this would have to be funded somehow, and unfortunately very few people are willing to pay $5 per month for software services, even if they use it every day. However, I suspect that a social media platform like this would be manageable enough that a small team could run it fairly cheaply and profitably if they're creative. Perhaps with nothing but donations.
Who will create this egalitarian social media? Not me, that's for sure. I already have my fair share of work moderating the Bear discovery feed, to the extent I've had to bring on a second moderator (hello Sheena!) to keep it clean of spam and other nasty things that free services on the internet attract.
That being said, I would love to see something like this. I'd love to be able to stay connected with friends and family abroad without having my attention sold to the highest bidder.
If anyone is working on something like this, I'd be happy to consult.
--
edit: I've collated a bunch of responses as well as some neat projects that were brought to my attention in Miscellaneous updates.
2025-09-10 19:35:00
If you're not aware yet, in 2022 Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices, according to unsealed court documents in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is because defaults matter. The vast majority of people use the default search engine/browser/maps/setup that a devices comes standard with. They also just live with the default notification settings, which I've written about before in an essay on digital hygiene.
Say what you will about Apple, but they do care about user experience more than the other big tech companies. This is mostly because the value-exchange with Apple is clear: You give them money, and in return they give you good hardware and software, and a commitment to privacy.
With Google this relationship is more nebulous. Google gives you a free search engine, free email, free document editing and storage, a free browser, free maps, and a bunch of other useful services; but the money comes from...elsewhere. It comes from influencing your buying decisions, and selling your data and attention to marketers; along with a whole host of privacy and security infringements along the way.
I understand why Google paid Apple all that money. Not only does it send lots of high value traffic to Google, but it also disincentivises Apple from creating their own search engine and competing with Google in this space.
Yet Apple is also the company that runs ads like this:
By accepting Alphabet's money, Apple essentially sold their user-base to Google. They paid lip-service to privacy until commercial interests dictated otherwise. If Google was the default search engine without money changing hands, Apple could argue that they just selected the best or most-popular search engine. But because that spot was bought and paid for, it's a big black mark on their commitment to privacy.
Complaining about corporate interests chasing profit aside, here's my hot take: If Apple really cared about privacy, not only should they choose a different search engine, they should block ads and trackers in Safari by default.
There are other browsers that do this; and it's fairly trivial to set up an ad-blocker in Safari yourself. But so few people do. Every now and then I find myself on one of those content-y websites without an ad-blocker, and it feels like I've entered a casino on crack—with animated banners, sliders, and flashing ads interspersing the content.
Seizure-inducing websites aside, advertising-driven tracking is a privacy nightmare, as is the personal-data-economy that underpins it all.
Here's the thing: Apple could do this tomorrow. They could easily make Safari block ads by default. And yet they don't, despite it not being in their user's best interests. This would cripple Google, true; but it's asymmetric. As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't rely on Google for anything. Yet there's nothing illegal about Apple blocking ads and trackers by default. Hell, I'm surprised the EU hasn't mandated it yet.
And Google isn't even paying them $20 billion a year to prevent this!
So if there're any higher-ups at Apple who read my blog, hello!
I'm not suggesting Apple go full nuclear right away, but this should at the very least be part of the conversation around what respecting users and their privacy means.
And if Apple does pull this off, I'll finally believe the billboards.
2025-09-01 19:50:00
When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform.
Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.
After the last instance of this I have come to the difficult decision to change Bear's license from MIT to a version of copyleft based on the Elastic License.
(edit: I chose this license over AGPL since I'm explicitly trying to prevent "free-ride competition", which AGPL doesn't protect against.)This new license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. Everything else is still permitted. You can view the specific wording here.
After spending time researching how other projects are handling this, I realise I'm not alone. Many other open-source projects have updated their licenses to prevent "free-ride competition" in the past few years.123456
We're entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing product only involves typing "Create a fork of this repo and change its name to something cool and deploy it on an EC2 instance".
While Bear's code is good, what makes the platform special is the people who use it, and the commitment to longevity.
I will ensure the platform is taken care of, even if it means backtracking on what people can do with the code itself.