> I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.

You're not alone. Here's how I solved it: Last year I really wanted a new smartphone just for the better camera. My existing phone from 2018 was still working fine, but the camera sucked.

So I bought a used, but only few months old, new smartphone.

And I never got it hooked up to the cell network (i.e. no SIM card). I now typically carry two phones on me. The old one is for texts/phones. The new one is for everything else. A clean separation. At times when I do groceries or something, I leave the SIM phone in the car so no one can contact me.

When the old phone finally dies, I'll just find the cheapest smartphone to replace it and maintain the separation.

For app notifications, I use the Buzzkill app to keep them down. For a long time I had it set up such that I would not get any notification for texts - other than a vibration. No sound. No flashing LED. And no notification in the task bar. If I wanted to know if I'd received a text, I'd have to open the app. I strongly encourage this set up.

Before I got a smartphone, I would turn my cell phone on only for emergencies and the occasional coordination (picking someone up - call him and let him know I'm downstairs). I told people they wouldn't be able to reach me on my cell phone, and to call my home phone (landline, and then VoIP) if they needed me.

Then I finally got a smartphone. I still have that home phone. But boy, I often tell people that my life is definitely worse because of that smartphone. I like the portable computing device, camera and GPS. Just not the phone part!

I have been considering this. I even came up with a name: Good Phone, Bad Phone. Your experience is instructive, thank you. Other than the additional cost, I think it has lots of upside.

I daily drive a Pixel on GrapheneOS and most of what I install is from F-Droid repos. I'm wondering if I should just de-SIM that one to make it 'Good Phone' and my 'Bad Phone' should just be a Light Phone or maybe something more featureful.

I should also add: I don't install apps like Signal/Whatsapp on the SIMless phone. No one should be able to call me on it. Period.

I do have a mail app on it, and it checks mail only when I tell it to (i.e. not running in the background giving me email notifications).

At home, I keep the phone with the SIM in one room. I can use the SIMless phone around the house and not worry about pings.

Definitely of a similar mindset... my text notification chime is about as subdued as I can make it... I mean I don't want to miss a text entirely, but would really rather push it all off. I disabled email notifications and other app notifications entirely. I wouldn't disable my actual phone calls, though I don't like that nearly half the calls I get are either spam, or bots notifying my of dr appts.

It's all gotten so dysfunctional as a whole. My SO gets on Tiktok live chats (whatever they're called) and I'll get into an X space now and then. Once in a great while, I'll pull up IRC. I really do miss the days of AIM an Yahoo Messenger chat groups though. It was fun. I also miss the locality of BBSing back when. With the internet, we tend to segregate based on interest, and you lose the local aspects and actual interaction, get togethers, etc.

> firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi

The best was when that hi came from the person you had steady started typing to

yes! before typing indicators.

This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.

> This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.

This should be the job of the OS, but ironically the OS is the biggest offender.

Should be solvable by a strong firewall/local proxy that blocks everything by default, only allows browser, and has an easy and convenient way to allow some outgoing traffic temporarily.

This is basically how computers in the 80s and part of the 90s worked.

I wonder if we could really bring back modems and BBS. How could we make that happen again? I feel like with modern internet, we’re stuck in this streaming TV, social media daze.

They never really went away, just sort of evolved, but a lot of the old ways were lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System

Impulse: We Resurrected Underground 1990s BBS Software in 2025.. With Docker [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422006

Phone makers keep touting AI features in their phones, but I haven't seen anyone applying it to notifications.

Here's my holy grail: the phone should, using on-device processing determine whether I want to be disturbed with a given notification now, when I'm not busy, at a specified time of day, or never.

Here reveals the crux of the engagement economy. You want to use your phone less and more meaningfully. EVERY SINGLE COMPANY wants the exact opposite for their bottom line.

apple intelligence does this. in fact the apple intelligence notification features are the only somewhat useful things it does.

you gonna sacrifice a shitton of privacy for a very small convenience here…

I wrote that I want it to use on-device processing. I probably should have added that I don't want it to subsequently send the data used for that to the vendor or a third party, but I thought it was implied.

Their request could be handled by a slightly complex ML model, usage over time by dumb if else statements in an on device program, or trivially by Ollama on a mid computer hosted on a home server.

The default doesn't have to be that all the data must be fed up to a company, computers can actually do a lot without it coming from someone else's server.

Privacy is long dead and you are not getting it back. If someone wants to buy comprehensive data about your personal life there is literally nothing you can do about it. The data broker economy is absolutely booming and no one is even making a token effort to curtail it. The government that is supposed to stop it wants it for themselves so they won't ever do anything.

One “low tech” solution would be to get a Faraday cage bag and out your phone in it when not in use