Like many who lived through this inversion I can absolutely relate.

I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.

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.

But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".

Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

> 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.

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

The Internet used to be semi literally a place you went - a desktop in the corner of some room, not central on a desk, not in your pocket. And with a ritual to access it on top of that and the dial up sounds and all.

It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.

It's funny -- before social media, I was more likely able to go find someone to chat with on IRC, a Usenet group, or some purpose-built forum. I knew where my friends were (ICQ, then AIM, then Skype, then GChat), and it worked.

Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?

See, I'm the opposite. I've got a Discord server, which are very much "where my friends are": If I make an acquaintance (or any of my friends do), they get added to the server. Some stick around, and get woven into the social fiber. Some never come back, and eventually get removed from the server during our annual purge. There's maybe 10-20 active people (i.e., people we see at least a couple times a month), a handful of regulars that are that multiple times a week, and then maybe twice all that again of people we hear from once in a blue moon. If I want to chat, I'll hop in voice. If I want to share something I found, I'll stick it in a text channel.

There's still plenty of communities on the internet. It's just that the communities worth belonging to are not wide open to the public. Community building does not scale.

I agree, I feel similarly. There are now 25+ car groups on fbook that I have to subscribe to, because the main web-board / usenet group for that car doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as it used to. Major vendors are providing support on fbook - which sucks.

honestly ive been thinking about this stuff too. a hypothetical forum you could only log on to read if you idled on a certain page for 15 mins or something would probably have a lot higher standard of discussion and be a lot better for peoples lives, for example.

The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...

Reminds me of https://diewithme.online/ which I just learned about.

Not exactly the same as your idea, but definitely in the same vein of "only available under a certain condition"

This is most definitely an invitation to abuse your phone’s battery, but at the same time I absolutely love this idea. It’s hilarious to imagine someone eagerly awaiting the chance to log onto the site as the battery dips from 8, to 7, to 6. “Just a couple more minutes…”

The SomethingAwful forums have been $10 to join since 2001. If you get banned, that's another $10 needed for a new account. Has worked pretty well for 24 years.

It's wild, and absolutely worth writing about, that at some point in recent years, the concept of "AFK" basically ceased to exist.

Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.

I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.

Honestly I don't hang out with people like that. If you can't put down your Distractify 9000 to play a game with me, then clearly I am not very interesting to you and it's better for both of us to do more engaging activities with more engaging people.

People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.

Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.

I think there's a mismatch of expectations which is a solid reason to pursue friendships elsewhere. I think the other party in scenarios like this probably assumes (incorrectly of course) that youappreciate the break so you can check your phone too.

There's definitely something borked with our brains though. I have had multiple people express surprise when I tell them that I will not check any notifications when I'm driving even if I'm stopped at a traffic light for a minute or more. I just don't want to be distracted, and yeah it takes conscious effort sometimes, but it does get easier once you learn from experience that the world will not fall apart if you check your messages later.

I even internally reframe it as future candy, which makes me engage more positively with async interactions. But practicing delayed gratification is hard.

I will let android auto read text messages and/or dictate to me and do phone calls at times - but it has to be hands-free and traffic not too bad. I almost never do anything with my phone at a red light.

In the UK, "stopped with the engine running" counts as "driving" for the purposes of smartphone use — no using your phone when stopped at the lights.

Not that the rule stops some people from doing it anyway, of course.

I think it's a similar thing in Ontario, Canada (where I live), you can be fined for checking on your phone even at red lights, though there are some caveats for "operating the car" related things (for example if you're using nav on your phone).

Back then Broadcast/Multicast (1 to all/1 to many) was expensive. It quite often resulted in routers and switches catching fire. The chips were too slow.

A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.

Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.

We used to relay messages in a mailbox once per day and got all new ones (called "Maustausch" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MausNet). It was pretty cheap because all group and personal messages came in one compressed batch and you had stuff to read and respond for a day. The BBSes exchanged all messages in a tree call hierarchy, you could reach everybody within that one day hop.

No matter where you are, everyone is always connected...

Usable mobile data that was fast enough was one of the tipping points, meeting with the first smartphone that was for the many, the iPhone around the same time.

> You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.

I am happy to disappoint these expectations. I feel no pressure from it whatsoever. Of course, I'm of the age of default offline, so that has a lot to do with it. Remember coming home to a "machine" to check messages? That was glorious even if it too had a glowing red dot that wanted your attention.

The always on mentality is not worth it and quite tiresome, figuratively and literally. I know it's different for women, but I've met a few that are really into the always on concept where they never leave the house without full war paint because "you never know who you might meet". I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

> The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly

As someone who twenty years ago published his XMPP presence to his web page (http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/02/27/jabber...) among other oversharing excesses, I have now swung opposite: online presence indicator is the first functionality I disable when I join any sort of forum and my tablet is almost always silent... Asynchronous interrupts least and unbroken concentration is most valuable, so asynchronous mostly - with exceptions for eligible professional contacts and sentimentally close people.

> Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly.

I've been reading this on HN for years but I've always been puzzled by it because it's both so different from my personal experiences and seems so divergent from the types who hang out on HN.

From around my mid-20s the expectation to be always on in any of my friend groups just evaporated. Until we hit our 30s there was still a general expectation to read socials after work hours but even then as we got older many of us were too drained after work to do much. Then once we hit our 30s the expectation was that our partners, homes, and often kids took precedence. None of my friends are posting Stories on Instagram with their newborns.

Now some of my friends do still love being always on their socials but a lot of these friends of mine when not on socials are constantly hanging out at social events or on calls with each other. They'd probably be the neighborhood gossips in an era before telephony.

So I'm curious: is this a real problem or is this a bit of a strawman? What sort of social pressure do you actually receive to be always on your socials? Is this related to going on dates?

It’s tough when being online feels like a constant demand. Trying out something like mailsAI helped me balance staying connected without feeling overwhelmed. It made managing my online time a bit easier and less stressful.