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[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Hello. Hello. Hello.
[00:00:07] Unknown:
Hello, and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you who are new here, let me briefly explain what this is all about. Freedom tech Friday is a live interactive show. It's hosted on the ungovernable misfits x feed, Nosta, when it can be bothered to work, YouTube, again, Rumble, when it can be bothered to work, and in theory, supposedly, apparently, Twitch, but I've never seen that. We go live one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on our Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed.
On FreedomTech Friday, we like to cover the latest news trends from anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin, Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. If there's any news items, tools, or topics that can help you take back some control in today's digital Panopticon, we wanna talk about it. My name is not Q and A, and I'm not the head of customer experience at Foundation. He is actually currently on stage, I believe. So I will be covering my name is Max. I'm from the Uncoverable Misfits, and I'm joined by Seth, the VP at k Wallet.
As mentioned, this show is a live interactive show. We rely on you guys to steer us towards the topics you wanna cover or send us the Freedom Tech related questions you want answering. There are many ways you can get involved, all of which really help spread awareness for the show. Comment and ask questions in the live chat, submit topics, questions before the show on X or Nosta, boosting the show in Fountain or any of the other podcasting two point o apps. You can send questions and tips in in Bitcoin or Monero via xmrchat.com/ugmf or just sharing the show.
Sadly, it seems it's bear market vibes, and the audience are participating in that. The biggest boost we had from last show on Kaggi was from Pies who sent a 121 sats and said, salute mushroom strong-arm. Thank you all for your support and sharing with friends and family and for joining us live. So without further ado, Seth, how are you, mate?
[00:02:58] Unknown:
Doing pretty good, Max. Good to have you here. Us us faithful for you. Q and a, teaching us as always. But we soldier on. We soldier on. Where is that robot? Is is it Manchester he's doing? I he mentioned the name of a conference that I have never heard of.
[00:03:17] Unknown:
It's the Infestor.
[00:03:19] Unknown:
Yeah. That sounds right, but I I don't know what that is. So Yeah. Some British thing. Some
[00:03:26] Unknown:
British thing. Yeah. Nothing to worry about, but he's stuck on stage. He'd be shilling some sort of, custodial app or something like that knowing him, and he might or might not join us. So today oh, actually, I missed the last one, the Kagi one. Still haven't caught up. How was that one?
[00:03:46] Unknown:
Oh, man. It was a blast. Yeah. I Yeah. I love getting to to shill really good products, especially ones that are, like, privacy preserving and just improve your life. So it was fun. I basically just, just touted their their services for the entirety of the time and commenced Q and A to try it out. And then we got a we got a we got a retweet from the cocky guys, but email me afterwards and thank me. It's pretty cool. I was glad that we were able to do that and highlight, just a fantastic service. So definitely worth going back and listening to for anybody who did miss it.
[00:04:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm gonna go back and listen because I think I might actually be sold and and finally actually, pay up some sats for it.
[00:04:25] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, well worth it. And don't forget when we talked about this last week too, if you use Notes, Nook, or Inte, I think both, offer some sort of, like, a three month free deal, for Logi. They all, like, partner together and giving deals if you use one and wanna try out any of the others. So you can you can save save money that way.
[00:04:45] Unknown:
That's pretty nice. Vibrant says in the chat, can't wait for Max to be the only Freedom Tech the only one on Freedom Tech Friday. Should be interesting.
[00:04:56] Unknown:
That would not be interesting because I wouldn't be able to answer hardly any of the questions. It would be an absolute fucking disaster, but maybe people would enjoy that. It'd be, like, fifteen minutes. It would just be max rambling. I mean, I I'd be down for it. Let's sprinkle some of those in there every now and then. Like, a quarterly max takeover. You just pick the topic. You ask yourself questions. Answer your own questions.
[00:05:18] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:05:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay. We'll consider maybe We could call it mad max. But you could just be angry about something and rail rail against something.
[00:05:28] Unknown:
Oh, I could certainly do that, mate. Okay. So onto the opener. Today, I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room. Our phones are designed to overwhelm us. Notifications, feeds, emails, group chats, reminders, alerts, badges, it never ends. And the more over and the more overwhelming it becomes, the more data we leak and the less control we have over our time and data. So how do we take back control of our time, attention, and sanity in today's digital world? It is a paradox to suggest that tech could be the answer. Is digital minimalism the antidote?
It's a good topic this week.
[00:06:17] Unknown:
It is. It is. I know I mentioned it before I went live, but this was the first topic that I I launched opt out with more than four years ago, which is absurd Wow. How long that is. But I I think it's it's one of the most important because it's one of those things that, like, it doesn't require any technical skill to jump into the minimalism side specifically. And I find that a lot of people who who tend towards minimalism are already kind of, like, well on the path towards towards privacy when it comes to the the digital world. So I I think it's a really good one to chat through. So I'm I'm excited for
[00:06:49] Unknown:
it today. Yeah. Definitely. Sometimes in, like, simplifying and stripping things out is the best way, like, with everything. Like, not just tech. Like, everything. Like, we're talking just before the stream, like diet. Like, sometimes just stripping things back and simple and things like that. So I think it's good. Dude, you wouldn't even be able to work the livestream. Listen, mate. I'm doing it now. Guess who's working the livestream? Do you think it's the technical wizard set for privacy, or do you think it's this fucking idiot?
[00:07:18] Unknown:
Yeah. We simplified it. Working. We made it max friendly. By by we, I mean, q and a and expatriotic made it made it max friendly. Not me. But I stood there in the corner while they did all the hard work.
[00:07:32] Unknown:
So, Seth, before we start trying to define digital minimalism, I wanna hear your take on how you cope with being online twenty four seven and the endless notifications. No need to talk about tactics or solutions. Just need to hear if it's something you guys wrestle with.
[00:07:53] Unknown:
Absolutely. It's something that I I wrestle with and I think is is kind of an endless war that you have to wage against the just the the horses that run at you in the digital world. It's it's something that, like I mentioned, I mean, I've I've been thinking about this and trying to implement this for many years, but it's not it's not easy because you you're essentially are having to go against what everyone else is doing and what every app and service, well, not every. Most apps and services, especially the ones that are not FreedomTech, they're trying to to tell you that the the path to happiness, the path to satisfaction, the path to to dopamine rushes is the opposite of minimalism. It's installing their app. It's buying their service. It's signing up with an account on their platform.
It's enabling notifications so you don't miss anything important. Every app that you install is begging for your attention. It's begging for your eyeballs, begging for your for your mind, begging for your your thoughts. And so this this is kind of a it's a constant battle, but it's one that I think is honestly the most important to wage because a lot of the the digital havoc that we live in right now, it just it can derail pretty much everything else that we want to do, derail social relationships, like real relationships, derail our ability to to focus and concentrate, derail our ability to be creative, and and invent new things.
And so I think it's yeah. I mean, it it's it's immensely useful. It is definitely something I wrestle with, especially when you're trying to, like, run a company. You're trying to be a high performer. You're trying to, like, stay on top of all of the the newest things that are happening. It's a balancing act always, but it's one that is is absolutely worth worth fighting for and one that I think will just continue to to reap benefits for for you and your family and your loved ones, anybody who kinda takes steps towards digital minimalism. And, honestly, we'll kind of set you up for success in ways that many other people will not have, which is sad, unfortunately, but, obviously, we can try to try to wake up everyone that we can.
[00:10:03] Unknown:
Yeah. So digital minimalism, we're talking about still being able to keep on top of things, still being able to use tech, not just, like, being a Luddite and just, like, not having a phone or anything like that, but it's it's sort of not having that distraction. And, like, the big one that I used to do, and I I'm better at it now, was I made the horrible mistake of, the first two things that I did in life in the morning were, number one, turn on my phone and look at all the notifications and get sucked in. And I'd often lie there, like, just, like, oh, fuck.
Fuck. Gotta do that. Oh, that's gone wrong. Oh, I've gotta do that. Oh, fuck. Fuck. And it sets your mind into this, like, horrible first thought, like, pattern. It disrupts anything, whatever your plans were, you're now going straight into firefighting mode. And then I'd go and get a coffee and continue to read all of it. And it would just put me in this horrible, shitty, unproductive, brain fogged, useless mood, and that's something I've cut out now. And the change just from that one thing, like, minimizing the screen time, I don't turn my phone on in in the morning now. Like, I would just leave it and then go for the next half an hour, an hour, like, sort the things that I need to do in the morning, and then I'll look at it, when I'm sat down and ready.
So that's kind of like a something that I would class as minimalism in terms of, like, minim minimizing your use of it. But how else do you think we could sort of describe minimalism in tech? Like, what would be something that without going too crazy extreme, you could implement?
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it really boils down to kind of how I define freedom tech, where it's technology that empowers you, the individual. And I think that a lot of good freedom tech does this for you. A lot of good freedom tech is minimalistic. A lot of good freedom tech limits your screen time. It doesn't try to to suck you into doom scrolling. There's there's good tools out there that are are useful for this, But I think the the hard part with digital minimalism is, like I mentioned, the the vast majority are are meant to enslave you, essentially, to to eat up your attention. So the way that I kind of see digital minimalism is you're trying to to use the bare minimum of what you need to actually have good relationships, to do well at your job, and to also have fun. But minimum like, going down to the the bare minimum that you can get by with in terms of notifications, in terms of apps that you have installed, in terms of accounts that you have on, websites, in terms of email subscriptions that you sign up for.
It's essentially just, kind of getting down to less is more and viewing that as the the solution to your problems and not more is more, which is really what kind of the the world at large tells you these days. Yeah. So I I think that's it's it's ultimately trying to bend technology to be something that empowers you and finding ways that are most useful to you. So I I think in a lot of this, digital minimalism will look very different from person to person. Some people, maybe you have a job where you you don't need to be always online. You don't need to be in Slack. You don't maybe you have a job where you can really disconnect a lot more than I can. Yeah. And so you could be a lot more aggressive with how you do this. Some people do have a, like, a high performing job or they have a they're running a company or they're doing something where they they really need to be available, and tuning that will be a lot more difficult, but still very possible.
But, yeah, I think it it really comes down to really tuning what apps you actually install, tuning what notifications you actually get, tuning what emails you actually get, and using different tools to actually help with all of those so that you're in charge of your time. You're in charge of when you think about this. You're in charge of when you go scroll Twitter, and it's not everything constantly vying for your attention.
[00:14:16] Unknown:
So maybe it'd be useful then to think about it like, the first thing that you could consider having less of might be devices. And then we can go into from devices down to applications and the software that we're running and, like, decluttering, basically, because that may be something that especially people listening to this, and I've been guilty of it as well. It's like having multiple devices all for all different tasks and different things, and suddenly you get into a, situation where you might have three or four phones and, like, two or three different computers and all this different stuff. And just that in itself actually, is just more to manage. It's more potential data leak. It's more stress.
So is there outside of, like, Graphene and using multiple users? Because we've kind of touched on that previously. Is there any other recommendations around the hardware that you you have or even these these dumb phones for some people? You know? If if you really can't control yourself and you really can't not reinstall these apps, like, is that a potential solution for some people?
[00:15:41] Unknown:
I mean, it's really gonna depend on each person. I think for most people, like, yeah, you don't need multiple phones. Like, for most people, I think if I own a tablet and a laptop or something like that, it's gonna be all that you need. So more is is often not necessary. But I think even with multiple devices, I think you can you can be minimalistic about how you use them, which is the more important thing. Like, multiple devices really is, like, do you have the money to afford the multiple devices? Is it actually a a a wise financial decision? Do you actually need these things is the more important question there? But, like, for instance, I I use an iPhone, and I use a a Pixel with GrapheneOS. On the iPhone, I very strictly limit what notifications I get. And on Graphene OS, I just get no notifications very intentionally. I use that for different things where I I don't want to get any notifications.
And the same for my tablet. I have a daylight tablet, and I, it comes out of the box with notifications disabled, which sounds insane, but it's actually it's actually really nice. Just never even think about notifications on that device. What tablet's that? It's the the daylight, the one with the the really cool black and white e ink style screen, but it's reflective and high refresh rate. And, yeah, it's it's a it's a good device. I don't use it quite as much as I did originally, but, yeah, it's it's still nice. So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily less devices. I mean, maybe. But there's also, like, me, I'm a tech enthusiast. I love trying new things. So I always have different devices lying around that I'm trying out. And I don't think that necessarily is at odds with dinner digital minimalism, but I think it would be more how are you using those devices. Do they actually have a clear purpose? And I think, really, when it comes to, like, too many devices, it would be more on the the home art automation IoT side of things where the trend is put a a Amazon Echo or an Alexa or whatever those are called. I don't keep up with that stuff anymore. Google Home, like, putting those in every room so you always have a screen, again, vying for your attention.
Always have music playing. Like, it's I think that's more of the risk when it comes to multiple devices or, like, too many devices is that you just you never have a, like, a safe space where you're not bombarded by a screen or notifications or, even just news headlines and stuff that pop up on the on that sort of thing.
[00:17:53] Unknown:
Yeah. So, obviously, people didn't think about taking like, definitely to have an echo or whatever, you know, that that kind of stuff in your house. And if you do, then go back to was it three episodes ago? We did the smart home episode. I think it was. Anyways, on the feed. Yeah. But we go into all of that in home assistant and using open source stuff and running it yourself, which I've actually taken Q's advice and ordered loads of bits, so I haven't set them up yet, security cameras and bits and pieces. So, that's worth having a listen if you haven't. But outside of that, probably the device that causes most people the most distraction and waste the most time and enslaves them more than anything else has got to be their phone, hasn't it, really?
And for that, I think outside of deleting apps that you don't absolutely need like, there's the there's the every now and again, I redownload Instagram just because, like, people will have messaged me on there, and then I miss those messages. So, like, every sort of three or four months, I'll download it, and I just realize how unbelievably addictive it is. It's just like it's like crack, so then I instantly delete it again. But so there's those kind of obvious apps that you can just delete and just fuck off out of your life unless it's your job to do it. Things like Twitter, I only have because of work, but it's horribly addictive.
And then outside of those, it's notifications. So any tips on notifications so people can still use these devices but not get overwhelmed?
[00:19:46] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. It it will depend somewhat on what device we're talking about. I I think, like, thankfully, both Android and iOS have a lot of good tools for Mhmm. Helping you to tune notifications. I mean, the the first step is just when you install that app and it asks you to enable notifications, just don't for the vast majority. Like, you you don't need Amazon to notify you when there's a deal. Like, dear god, please just disable notifications. You're gonna be okay. The package is gonna show up on your door when it shows up. You knowing it's out for delivery generally doesn't matter. Like, every single app is gonna ask you for notifications, and it's gonna tell you why they're so important.
They're just it's just an advertising angle. Like, pretty much everything is either they're advertising actual products or they're advertising themselves to you of, like, this is why you should be on Instagram right now because you're missing out on all the fun. You're you're not living the best life because you're not scrolling Instagram right now. Like, just just don't enable notifications for the vast majority of apps. And I think people would be really surprised that even even drastically limiting your notifications in terms of messages and emails is, like, really good for you. Like, one digital minimalism, like, habit that I've leaned on, I'm not always great at it. Like I said, this stuff is always like, it's it's a a battle of personal will, honestly.
So I'm absolutely not perfect at it. But But one thing that has been really helpful is just disabling email notifications entirely even for work. Like, Dick, if you're listening, yes. I I don't get your email notifications. But scheduling a time during every day or I know some people who go crazy, and they do it, like, weekly where you go through and you check all of your emails from the last time that you checked them. So I'm gonna be a might be a problem for you there. Yeah. Yeah. That that would not be a good life choice, I think. So, yeah, I I cannot be that aggressive. But even just saying, like, I'm gonna check them weekly and carve out a time to go through email is so much better for you. Like, so much better for your mental health. Like you said, it helps in the morning where if you get up and the only notifications on your phone are from your family group chats, that's very different than you wake up in the morning and you have 78 Slack messages and 14 Telegram messages and 18 emails to go through.
Instead, take it at your own pace. When you're ready to go check email, you go check email. Now, obviously, that will mean that you have to actually be on top of that, make sure that you do it so you don't miss something important. But something like that sounds really crazy and aggressive until you actually do it, and you realize how freeing it is to get less notifications. The other main thing and I I can't remember. I don't think Android has something like this. One thing that I've really been enjoying on my iPhone is that for those apps where you do want notifications, but you don't want them immediately, they have this, like, notification summary thing where you can just set certain times of the day that you want to get a summary of all the notifications that you missed, and it will just wait. It'll hold all these notifications. And then at that time of the day, it'll give you all of the notifications for those apps. For, like, apps that are, like, lower priority, I still wanna see what they what they have in terms of notifications, but I don't wanna get them immediately. I don't want them to disrupt me. I can say, like, hey. I'm I'll usually at my desk at nine and three. So give me that notification summary at nine and at three if anything that I need. Quite good. Yeah. And it's it's a really nice feature that, again, lets you, like if you can't completely disable notifications for something, but you also don't need to know that minute and you maybe just need to know that day, it's a good solution for that as well. I don't think Android has an option for that, but I may be forgetting it. But that is something unique there. But yeah.
[00:23:28] Unknown:
I recently did similar on my iPhone, but I went way more aggressive. I just did, like, nobody outside these, like, 20 people can actually call me. It's just you cannot. Not from from at at any point of the day, you cannot. It will show me that someone's tried to call me, but that's it. And there's no no notifications for anything at all. I can't remember what the mode is, like, not disturb mode or some kind of thing like that. And I've I've only been doing that for the last sort of maybe month or something like that, but it is actually quite nice because like you said, like, most of the time, nothing's really that important.
And if someone really fucking needs to speak to you, they can leave you a voice mail, and you can check your email when you want. And nothing's flashing or causing you any sort of, like, disruption or anything like that. So, again, not everyone can do it, but, if you can, it's quite nice. Anyone in the chat who has any good tips, I'd love to hear them, or any questions, I'd love to hear them too. We've also got rebuilding a home screen, so moving distracting apps to the last page so they're not right in front of you when you open your phone can be quite a nice one.
Maybe four, five, six essential apps kept on the home screen, like your camera and maps and calendar and notes and that kind of stuff, and then everything else further back so it doesn't distract you. Any others there that you can think of in terms of, like, home screens?
[00:25:19] Unknown:
I know there's you can go pretty crazy on iOS and I think Android too with, like, what things you get during certain times. Like, you can use focus modes to change your lock screen to show you specific widgets and stuff, which which I've never really waded into. But the one thing that I have found really useful, and this is something I've I have on all of my Android devices, is using a more minimalistic launcher. It it's basically gonna give you a lot of what these, like, minimalist phones try to do, where they just try to, like, make it hard for you to do anything. But the the launcher, obviously, doesn't restrict what you can have installed on your phone, how those apps work. But something like olauncher, which I've used for many years on on Android, lets you just have a a basically, a text line with the name of the app. And you can pick however many you want, like up to eight, but it'll just say signal. There will be no icons. There will be no no app drawer. You can search for anything that you want by just swiping down. So it's always easy to get to what you need to get to. But, again, it's trying to help yourself resist the urge to open Instagram. When it's not on your front page, when you don't have a 100 icons staring at you when you open your phone, all vying for your attention, it's a little bit easier. So that that's really, really solid. I've used both Olauncher and Niagara.
Olauncher is a little bit more minimalistic, a little bit more privacy preserving. Niagara is very full featured, and you can do some really cool unique stuff on there. So I specifically use Niagara on my Daylight tablet. It's what ships with it. That's how I learned about it. And then I use Olauncher on my GraphiOS phone. And I find those really, really useful. Unfortunately, there's not anything similar for iOS. But like you said, you could just limit what apps you actually put on your phone. It's gonna take a little bit more self restraint from you. But,
[00:26:59] Unknown:
yeah. Sure. Okay. That's a good one. Vibrant has said, grayscale. Bon has said, some people do grayscale, but I've tried it and can't keep it. I've tried that as well, and I I normally do it like before. I was doing it before night, like, so that I'm not getting the blue light and all that stuff, or at least I don't think I am before going to bed. And on at least on the iPhone, you can set it and then, like, triple click the side button, and then it goes into, gray mode, which is actually quite good.
[00:27:35] Unknown:
That's a good use for the shortcut button. Never thought about that. I'm sure you could do that on on our phones as well to easily swap between it.
[00:27:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Makes me switch nice just just for the evenings. I I do find it annoying because, like, a lot of the stuff that we do with Ungovernable Misfits is quite visual, like the art and all that kind of stuff. And then I'll I'll I'll have it in gray scale, and then I'll suddenly open up some art. And I'm like, I can't actually tell if this is good or not. I need to fucking see some color here. So, I'd yeah. For me, just at least in the evenings, it's quite a good one. What else have we got? Fixing email overload. We kinda covered that a little bit.
[00:28:18] Unknown:
Let's touch on the the algorithmic feeds one. I think that one's really useful. Oh, yeah. Go on. Quick. You jump on that one then, mate. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that I also have done really aggressively, like, I, for a long time, was absorbed in the news cycle and in group chats. We're talking about noise and then noise. That's a good good football.
[00:28:39] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:28:40] Unknown:
Talking about news and, like, it's very easy to just constantly get sucked into whatever the latest thing is, get sucked into doomscrolling, get sucked into algorithmic feeds. And, like, sometimes, again, like I talked about, that's necessary. Like, if you're doing marketing, you're gonna need to scroll Twitter. Like, there are a lot of reasons why you you need to be in the algorithm algorithmic feed world, but I think for most people, avoiding it is gonna be much, much better for you. And it's gonna get you higher quality content. Algorithms are really good at feeding you slop and rage bait and engagement posts and Web scop. Yeah. Stuff that's just not, like, not actually beneficial for you. It's stuff that keeps your attention.
And so shifting away from that and using, like, RSS for most of your news and blogs, etcetera, is really, really powerful. This is what I do to follow all of my favorite blogs, to follow many of my favorite websites. Not all of them support RSS. I have a couple that I I can't get RSS working, and I need to take the time to just build my own RSS feed from them, but I haven't done that yet. But it's it's just a fantastic way to get news, again, at your pace to get only what you want, only from sources you want, and not have to deal with algorithms at all. Specifically on iOS, there's a RSS app called NetNewsWire.
Absolutely fantastic. Highly recommend it. And then on Android, there's a bunch of options. A lot of them have kind of died or aren't really maintained anymore. The best one that I have found is called Feeder, I believe. I'm trying to double check that that's the right name. Yeah. Feeder. It's open source, totally free to use, no no cost, but works really, really well. Like, specifically, I use that on my daylight daylight tablet, because reading RSS on a screen like that is just really fantastic. But, yeah, as Weird said, sometimes finding a site specific RSS feed is really painful. Really good sites would, like, have a link direct directly, but for a lot of them, you'll have to, like, try slash feed slash feed.xml/rss and just, like, try to to find it yourself, which is which is a pain.
But, yeah, RSS works really well. We talked about it all last week, so I won't get into detail. But Coggy News is the way that I ingest news these days. They do a really good job of letting you curate what categories you want. Real people actually define what goes into those categories, and you can also participate in that process. And, yeah, that's just a a good straightforward way to do that.
[00:31:14] Unknown:
Yeah. And, Q's got it down here as well. Social media, browser only to reduce usage. Yeah. That is huge if you can do it. And, like, if if you especially, I think I think if you spend your time oh, q and a has joined. Let me add him to the stream.
[00:31:32] Unknown:
Here he is. A wild robot appears.
[00:31:35] Unknown:
The head robot. Late than that. We how are you doing, mate? What
[00:31:41] Unknown:
what what a fifteen minutes I've had. Sorry to to jump in the flow, guys. I, so that the the panel ran over, so I was late anyway. And then the room that I was promised by the hotel where where this is being held, they gave me some a key to somebody else's room. So I let myself in, and there's, like, a map from the front of people's clothes everywhere. I'm like, I don't think I should stay here. So then I went back then I went back down to the reception. They were very apologetic and they realized that instead of the Hotel Room Number 507, they meant to give me Conference Room 5 also. But then I got into Conference Room, whatever I'm in, and then the hotel Wi Fi wouldn't work.
And then I got myself into the hotel Wi Fi and then got into the green room, messaged Max, and Max didn't pick up my message for another five minutes. So I could have been in much earlier, guys, but, it's a bit of a bit of a mission to get here. Sounds like Max's fault, honestly.
[00:32:36] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's ask the chat if we believe this robot or whether you actually just have that extra pint. Let's have a vote. Just say yes, believe, or no for don't believe that. Silly, silly story.
[00:32:50] Unknown:
He was having Well, unfortunately, I don't have a room room full of, 250 nostrils to back me up. So Alright.
[00:32:58] Unknown:
Fair enough, mate. Well, welcome back. I feel like I've been trying to, do your job very, very poorly, especially as I can't read even though the notes are amazing. So do you want to take your usual spot and take over? Ninety nine waffle. Ninety nine waffle. Oh, and before we do, just just quickly, thank you very much to cowboy Cassidy for tipping 0015 XMR
[00:33:25] Unknown:
and saying thank you, gents. Thank you, mate. That's very kind of you. Well, I think it's, yeah. Thank you for the tip, by the way. Very kind. Yeah. Apologies for, being being late. But, yeah, I I haven't got much context on what you've already covered. So, Max, why don't you carry on for now just with the the show notes, and I'll I'll be the I'll be the guest for a change, and I can take you over when we come to and stuff later. That sounds good. So we've done, algorithmic
[00:33:49] Unknown:
feeds, fixing email overload, and we're on to low noise privacy preserving alternatives. So this is a good one. So, messaging queue, favorite, messaging options.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
And maybe how specifically you, like, tie them into digital minimalism. I think some things here, I think I'm a little curious, like, how they how they specifically fit in. So yeah.
[00:34:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, this this is a difficult one because the the the messaging apps that you use are mainly defined by the where the people are that you actually want to speak to rather than the ones that you may or may not want to use. So I'm probably like you guys where I've got more messaging apps than I need, and I frequently turn down invitations to the next group app Mhmm. Because I just already have way too many notifications. So I I try and slim it down and consolidate as much as I can so that I don't have 5,000,000 notifications from 40 different apps rather. I've still got 5,000,000 notifications, but they're only coming from, you know, a handful of apps, which makes it a little bit easier to manage.
But I use all of the regular ones like Signal, WhatsApp for my norm normie stuff. I don't use Simplex anymore. I don't use Streamer anymore. I don't use any of the Nosta ones. What else do I have? I don't use iMessage. So it it is pretty much consolidated into Telegram and Signal at the moment, which is great. And then the the other thing I do when as it pertains to to messaging apps and, more specifically, digital minimalism is just and you probably already covered this, but just, like, turn off all notifications. Like, there is not a single Telegram chat, including the ungovernable misfits one, sorry, guys, that makes any noise or vibrates in my pocket when it goes off. None of them do.
And I I because I'm in so many groups, it would just become unmanageable. It would be a full time job just to to keep up with them or to just, you know, be distracted by every time one of those chats goes off. So none of them make any sound. None of them vibrate. So it it has to be rather than than, you know, the notification on the phones pinging me, it's me going to look at those apps. And, again, I'm I'm sorry if I'm covering all ground here, but I I kind of try. I often fail, but I try to schedule time to go and look at the what I deem as, like, the less important notifications. So I can tell you what I'm missing.
You can. Yeah. Exactly. Anytime I see Max, that's what it's like. Right down the bottom of the list. Yeah. Exactly. But but no. It's prioritized in such a way that I have, like, some personal chats, like, with you guys that can make noise, and they do make noise. But, like, group chats and things like that, they they just I I have to go looking for them to see what what the latest is rather than them pinging me every time somebody you know, Max is like, oh, look. I broke something else. Can you help me?
[00:36:45] Unknown:
Hey. Listen. It happens a lot less recently, doesn't
[00:36:48] Unknown:
it? To be honest. It certainly does. Yeah. You've you've come a long way. Yes. You've come a long way. Thank you. And and I do exactly the same thing on desktop as well. So Telegram doesn't make any any noise, doesn't interrupt interrupt me on my on my, computer, neither does signal, WhatsApp, any of those sorts of things. Like, I have to go looking for them apart from a select few. And I guess, you know, the other thing I could could cover off as well while we're talking about messaging is, like, priority contacts, so that I've got, you know, obviously, the wife, parents, and things like that, special contacts that even if I'm in a a do not disturb mode, which I'm sure you guys have probably already covered off, Like, they can break through that. And, you know, if they if they text me or call me more than once, then it will get through irrespective of whether I'm trying to block the world out and and get some sleep or just stay away from my phone for ten minutes.
[00:37:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Good shout. We have covered some of that, but it's all important stuff. The other one that we haven't gone into is just, like, setting limits, on specific apps that might take too much of your attention. The obvious ones like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, those type of things. Is that something either of you do, or are you just very disciplined?
[00:38:07] Unknown:
For me, I I've tried it, and it's not enough of a deterrent for the apps that really, you know, get their claws into me, like Twitter and things like that. The only viable fix I found for that really is to just get rid of, like, the native application or make it more difficult for me to access it. Simply me getting a notification say, hey. You've been a naughty boy. You've been on Twitter for seventeen hours today. Like, it's not enough of a hiring for me to be like, oh, fuck you. I know better. If the app is not if the app is not there and the alternative is either me going to, up to my office to get my computer or me going on Brave on my phone to then log in to Twitter web app. Like, that's enough of a of a, you know, hurdle Barrier. Barrier for me to be like, oh, you know what? Like because most of the time when I do that, and I'm sure I'm speaking for for you guys as well and most of the audience, if I put my phone out on it, the aim is to just it's like an unconscious, mindless ten minutes of scroll, scroll, scroll, you know, get some dopamine hits. Yeah. If I've got a lot into something, that's enough of a deterrent for me to be like, do you know what? You can go and do something else. You know? And it doesn't even need to be anything, you know, more productive. It might just be, I don't know, pulling out a crossword app on your phone or doing some Sudoku to actually, like, stimulate your mind rather than just fry up fry up your, dopamine receptors.
[00:39:29] Unknown:
Mhmm. Yeah. And then other ways to make it less addictive or at least simplify things would be the workflows. So what tips have we got in terms of simplifying things down, having less, but still being able to achieve what you would otherwise?
[00:39:55] Unknown:
I think a lot of this is where it comes down to, like, just general minimalism. Like, it's gonna be the same as if you were trying to keep your house, minimally cluttered. A lot of the same things are gonna happen. You're gonna regularly clean up. You're gonna make sure that you don't buy all of those knickknacks to put on the shelf because they just end up being something you have to clean up at the end of the day. Like, a lot of it is is the same when it comes to the digital world for me where it's it's really limiting. Like, we talked about a little bit earlier, but we we can go into more detail. It's limiting what apps you actually install, leaning on browsers instead, as much as possible. Progressive web apps are really, really useful for this as well.
But I think for me, one thing that I do really like on, at least, Graphi and OS. I don't know if it's a general Android thing, but at least Graphi and OS. You can tell it to actually automatically, disable apps that you don't use frequently, and it'll tell you what apps, it disables when it does that. And that happens a lot more frequently than you would realize. Like, I think a lot of times when you look at your phone and you go through the apps, you're like, oh, well, I think I, like, I might need that. I I use that sometimes, and you don't realize, like, you haven't opened that app in six months. Like, all you're getting by having that app installed is you're being tracked more than you would be otherwise, and you're taking out space on your on your phone, and you're being distracted every time you scroll through your app list by things that aren't actually useful.
So I think a lot of it is that. I think you you could also be more specific and, like, you don't need seven notes apps. You don't need to be using probably signal, simplex, session, white noise. You probably don't need, like, eight chat apps that are all gonna be giving you different notifications. Like, I think a a lot of that will will go into play as well. But
[00:41:37] Unknown:
And notes wise, notes Nook is still the favorite for both of you, isn't it?
[00:41:43] Unknown:
For sure.
[00:41:44] Unknown:
That's the go. So you can just have just have that and nothing else and fuck everything else off.
[00:41:52] Unknown:
Yeah. That that's what I do. Did you guys oh, quick shout out to the to the gang, Bond, zapped, 2,121 SAT and Kieran, of zap.stream. Thank you for your service, sir. Zap, 121 SAT as well. Thank you very much. Did did you have you guys talk about, like, focus modes,
[00:42:11] Unknown:
particularly on iOS? I don't know. Did. Yeah. We did. We went into well Not a lot. We went into, like yeah, you can jump in if you want, but we did cover, like, going extreme and, like, blocking everything and then being more granular with them. And then I think didn't you mention some other, like, what was the what was the thing you mentioned, Seth, where it was, like, adjusting the view of how you see things as well?
[00:42:41] Unknown:
Oh, just that, this is focus modes on iOS. You can, like, change your lock screen based on what focus mode you're in to show different things. But I'm definitely curious how you use different focus modes queue because it's it's something I think I don't lean on as much as I should. I definitely use just, like, do not disturb pretty regularly, but I haven't really tuned anything else. So I'm curious.
[00:43:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Something I've used I'm starting to use a lot more at the moment, especially a little bit more granular. So, full on do not disturb when I go to bed. That's scheduled. I don't even have to think about it. That just means that I don't get any notifications on screen at all with the exception of my trusted contacts. So, like, if the wife's out, she needs to call me, she can break through that. I've got another one, for it's literally called work chat off. So I can just flick that on when I've kind of had enough of reading the work notifications, which, you know, in the distributed global team is essentially twenty four seven. You can quickly find yourself sucked into doing an extra two hours work in the evening if you're not very kind of vigilant with that. So I've I've got a focus mode there that essentially just stops the, virtual office application that we've got, from pinging me, essentially. So it's like do not disturb, but just for a single app so that everything else is able to break through because I'm still, you know, in my free time in the evenings, etcetera.
I've got another one for fitness. So if I'm going out for a run, my phone's not gonna be going off and interrupting my music. Or same if I'm in the gym, like, the work chat's not gonna be pinging, etcetera, etcetera. Again, that's all automated. So if I start, like, a workout tracker, on my watch or something like that or on my phone to say that I'm heading to the gym, then, that would automatically, you know, turn itself on and just reduce those interruptions as well. And then the other one that I have is kind of like a work filter where I'm in, like, a, you know, deep focus mode, which essentially turns off everything apart from phone calls, and the work application so that, you know, if I've got, like, a couple of tasks that are pertaining to to what I do at Foundation, then, you know, you guys in the Telegram chat or somebody on Signal can't just pop in and disrupt my workflow, essentially. So I've got loads of different ones. I probably use all of them, at some point each and every day.
And some of them or most of them are actually scheduled so that they come on automatically when I'm taking, or starting a, you know, a certain activity wherever possible at least. And I found, you know, huge benefits to that, because it might not sound a lot. You know? People's never, kind of gone into this and gone down the rabbit hole of kind of trying to, you know, maximize your focus time and and limit your interruptions. Just the fact that your phone pings, and it's a signal message or a WhatsApp message or something like that doesn't sound like a massive interruption if you're deep into a work project or something like that. And I guess that could be true if you're very, very disciplined and and are, I guess, disciplined enough to, you know, see it and ignore it. I personally am not, and that's why I need these focus modes so that my phone just doesn't go off in the first place.
And the same goes for my you know, everything I've just said is is also applicable to my laptop as well. So I've have all of the same sort of focus modes as well. I'm just not disciplined enough to be like if if my phone goes off, I might see that, oh, it's a message from Max and be like, yeah. Ignore. But the fact that I've now got my phone in my hand the fact that I've now got my phone in my hand then then leads me to be like, oh, I'll just have a quick check on Twitter, and I'll just check, or see what the Bitcoin price is. And then I'll just, what was that note I made about doing the shopping later? And you've quickly wasted twenty minutes on your phone, and then you're like, ah, shit. Like, you know? Yeah. So for me, prevention,
[00:46:23] Unknown:
is is the best cure. My inbox says I have all notifications off on my phone except alerts for the company. I actually have exactly the same or I was just saying last couple of weeks, all notifications off, and no one can call me outside of about 20 people. Just can't do it. And that has been a a massive win. And, he also says signal can be handy for daily quickie notes. That's was it one of you who mentioned that to me the other day? It's like note to self or something like that.
[00:46:52] Unknown:
Yeah. It's, I think Seth and I both do it. We it's it's an easy way to get, information from your phone to your computer. Yeah. Or, obviously, you know, storing something for later, you just need message to self. Yeah. I I use that every day. It's really useful. If we wanna hop into questions, I'm not the host, Mac, so you can either try and figure out how to do it, or we can just not bring them up on screen, and I can read them out from the notes.
[00:47:20] Unknown:
Why don't we do that? Not not bring them up on screen. We'll just read them out.
[00:47:24] Unknown:
Because I I Yeah. They Because I've I have a little win at the moment where I've hosted and nothing's currently gone wrong, I just don't wanna tempt fate. I just wanna have one win. Oh, I appreciate that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. That makes sense. Well, if you're listening to the livestream and you've got any digital minimalism or productivity hacks or tips for us or any questions, please do drop them in. We've got another ten minutes now. But for in the meantime, I'm gonna hit, some of the presubmitted questions. First one, bit of a tongue in cheek question, but, it's from what why Wyatt Serp. What's up?
How cooked am I if all my family's photos auto upload to Google Images? And then you've got a clown emoji. So I think this is kind of like a jokey question, but I wanted to answer it anyway because, there there's probably people listening to this that do, unfortunately, do that. I mean, yes. It's great that they're all backed up, but it's not great that they're all backed up to to Google's, to Google's cloud where they they are quite open and honest about the fact that, you know, they're they're not very private, especially from Google. And I guess anytime that you store anything that's not encrypted on somebody else's server, there's privacy trade huge privacy trade offs to that, but also, trade offs in terms of, like, they could get out. And when you're talking about photos of your kids and things like that, that is just not a trade off I'm kind of willing to make. So, yes, I know you probably it was a little bit tongue in cheek. But, yeah, if you're looking for an alternative, for me, it would be Proton Drive, Evidence and to an encrypted, etcetera.
Yes. It's a paid service, but, with Google, you're paying with your privacy and with ProOn, you're paying with Alternative as well.
[00:49:06] Unknown:
Oh, I know what you're gonna say. Yes. I'm glad you bring in the There are multiple. I may say a different one than you think. But if your family are all using iPhones, you could help them to enable advanced data protection and set you as a recovery contact. And then their photos going into iCloud photos are Internet encrypted. Obviously, that does require the ADP step, which may be too much, or if someone's not on a not on an iPhone, which everyone using Google Photos implies. Maybe they're not on iPhones. But I know a lot of people who use Google Photos even though they're on an iPhone, which is a little weird. So that may be an option. The other one, of course, would be Entei, which is is really good, and I think it's the closest experience to Google Photos, that I've tried. But yeah.
[00:49:55] Unknown:
Sorry, guys. My connection's a bit spotty here, but I think I'm back now. What have we got? Ready to prepare asks, how much digital minimalism belongs to the choice of the correct launcher on your phone? I don't know whether you guys cut this off before I, joined, but it's a good
[00:50:13] Unknown:
question. Yeah. We did touch on, Olauncher and Niagara specifically. I think just generally, like, I think it's it's very useful. But just like everything else about digital minimalism, like, if you really wanna get around it, you'll get around it. Like, you you do have to also just make it, like, a personal choice even when it's difficult to stick with that sort of thing. But I think it's it's a great first step to minimize how easy it is for you to get into those doom scrolling apps to to only present yourself with the ones you absolutely need, the ones that are less time sync.
So it's definitely a good first step.
[00:50:48] Unknown:
And I guess what the the iOS alternative to that would just be, I guess, widgets maybe and getting rid of as many apps as you can. Like, there there's no there is no concept of a launcher per se with iOS. So it's it's gonna be a lot more of a not not necessarily, I guess, a manual process, but, less of a customizable process where you can have certain information, you know, in widgets or in stacked widgets, which I know is is, quite popular. But outside of that, like, you ain't gonna be able to get, like, a a list. Like, I think it is that the one where it's just black and white text with a a lot of your applications? Like, I don't think you're gonna be able to get something like that, on iOS. Correct me if I'm wrong. No. Not at all, unfortunately. Okay. Another one from ready to prepare.
Wearables. Are these items the opposite of digital minimalism by definition? I would say yes in short. But then, again, everything that we've just spoken about today can be applied to wearables as well. Like, you you can still manage what notifications reach your wrist or or whatever else you've got there. It comes back to that discipline piece. But I guess one of the main features of these wearables and why people do wear them is that they can have their notifications on their wrist. So it is, by definition, I guess, you know, at loggerheads with digital minimalism, but that's not to say that you can't have one and still kind of use it, in such a way that it doesn't act as a time sink. Like, I have one. I use it mainly for fitness.
It never pings. It doesn't have I don't have any notifications or anything like that on there because of all of the reasons that we've been talking about today, but it I I'm kind of a bit of a fitness fanatic, and the trade off of me having to do that and manage all of those, or turn off all of those notifications is enough for me so that I can see that, you know, I'm getting faster at my running or whatever else it is that's kind of, important to me. But I don't know what what your guys' takes are on the the wearables piece. You so you're saying you have a wearable, but you just turn all the notifications off? Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you, yeah, if you ping me on Signal or Telegram, like, it ain't most of the time, it ain't getting to my phone, and it never ever gets to my watch. Okay.
[00:53:07] Unknown:
And is there around wearables then any advice on, maybe, like, the privacy side and everything of doing that? Like, some are gonna be much worse than others. Some are gonna link into all these other, like, fitness apps and wanna share with someone on fucking Facebook that you've just got up and done a sit sit up, like, way with, like, clapping hands emojis. Like, is there a way to do this without have having, like, leaking all of this data and also distracting yourself so much that you're one of those twats who sits in the gym and just stares there, watch your phone, and does fuck all?
[00:53:45] Unknown:
Yeah. It I I think the the the first piece is obviously gonna be driven by your phone. Like, if you're an Apple user, you you kind of have two choices. You get an Apple Watch or you get a Garmin, and have a a lesser experience. Lesser in terms of, just one sec. There's somebody, just on the door. Just hang on a second, guys. And they're gone. Yeah. So it's driven mainly by your phone, most of the people that have the wearables. There's obviously gonna be trade offs. It's literally a tracker that you attach to your body. Again, some people might argue that's a feature, not a bug because one of the main things is for tracking your health, your metrics, your running speed, etcetera, etcetera.
There are steps that you can take, depending on the application, of course, that you can take to limit your privacy. If you're doing it in the Android ecosystem, you can kind of, especially within the Graphene ecosystem, you can ensure that any companion apps do not have access to the Internet so that whilst your watch might be sending all of the data back to your phone, let's say let's just call it companion app one, you can just limit that application so that it cannot talk to the Internet. So you can prevent the fact that any of your data is is it's only going between your watch and your phone. Obviously, there's still some trust, assumptions there because it's, you know, it's a complex beast, But you can definitely, there are steps that you can take, or choices that you can make so that you can have a little bit of both worlds where you're able to have all of these metrics if you're, you know, a bit of a fitness nerd. We'll also do that in a somewhat of a privacy preserving way.
[00:55:23] Unknown:
On the, backup stuff that I can see in the chat going on, and we've talked about this a lot with, like, family photos and bits and pieces. It might just be because I like hardware more. But is there not a simple solution for, like, say, you're running Android and you've got all of your photos on your phone that you could because you don't have the expandable memory, could you not have, like, a simple device where you can just dock your phone once a week or once every few days, and it just backs up onto an actual solid drive or, like, backs onto two or something like that rather than having to rely on some version of a cloud, however it's set up? Is there not, like, a more old school physical way?
[00:56:14] Unknown:
I don't think so. I mean, not in one that not in a way that would be more, like, automated like that. I mean, you could literally just, like, plug in a a drive over USB c Yeah. And do it. Like USB fixes this. Yeah. I mean, it it it works. I I Yeah. Wouldn't want to, like, go select all the images since last time and do it all. So, I mean, you can you can be your own cloud. Like, you can host your own next cloud or image or something like that. I don't I don't feel like there's a reason not to do something like that. But, I mean, like, I've talked about personally, I just I don't want to self host this. I don't want that responsibility. So I'm I'm happy with using a cloud as long as it's intent encrypted. Like, that's the whole that's the whole thing. If they can't access my data, only I can. I think that's a a win win that I don't have to host it. I can support a good company, and I can get all the functionality that comes with that as well. Yeah. Fair enough.
[00:57:18] Unknown:
Final question. It does tells beautifully into what that's just been talking about. Because
[00:57:31] Unknown:
Missing most of that, unfortunately, Hugh. Yeah. Unfortunately,
[00:57:35] Unknown:
Hugh is still actually in a third world country. So let me just have a look through because his Internet is terrible. We'll look through what question he might have been asking. I can't see what question he was did you say Kazani or something like that?
[00:57:54] Unknown:
I'm Oh, here we are. Sure. I couldn't make that out. Yeah. Kazani,
[00:57:57] Unknown:
BitChat or White Noise and why? Neither, I think. Isn't it?
[00:58:04] Unknown:
I mean, they're absolutely unnecessary for the vast majority of people. I think BitChat is interesting only for the use case, in my opinion, of protesting in a place where you don't want your cell phone to be exposed. You can put it on airplane mode and just do chats over Bluetooth. Really useful for that. Or for, like, hyperlocal, like, you're at a conference. Like, you're at a conference and you want to do questions for the audience in the room. Like, that's the other cool use case I've seen. For normal messaging, no. I don't understand why they're adding, like, Noster based worldwide messaging. It's really stupid. We don't need another messaging app. White noise is very interesting in the cryptography they're using.
It's, like, the only thing that's interesting outside of signals protocol, basically, when it comes to privacy for messaging. And so that's really cool. Their usage of Nostred relays as the network is, I think, going to prove to be a bad idea, but we'll we'll see on that. But, again, it's you're kinda like if you're already using signal or something like that, like, why would you switch? There's not really any reason. You're gonna lose all the network effects that signal, already has. And you don't probably need another messaging app. But I do really like what Wet Noise is trying to do. It's just I've gone through the whole thing of like, I try every messenger app under the sun, and I have them all posted on my side. And I have to juggle 18 different privacy preserving messaging apps, and it's just not fun. So I'm definitely a minimalist when it comes to that now.
[00:59:34] Unknown:
Hey, guys. Sorry. Hotel Wi Fi, very spotty. I got booted out. That wasn't the question from Kazani, so I will let's recover the last one on a couple of things, and we'll we'll keep the answers very brief. If you are forced to keep exactly one cloud syncing service for the rest of your life, that includes photos, notes, contacts, everything, which single service would cause the least long term regret from a digital minimalist perspective and why? For me, it has to be Proton if it's all encompassing. I know you mentioned notes there, and Proton doesn't necessarily have a a notes function, but it kind of ticks all of the other boxes.
I guess, I I like the the company ethos. I like the fact that they have Nintendo and encrypted. Most, if not all, of the clients are open source, and it's reasonably priced.
[01:00:22] Unknown:
Yeah. Can't argue with that, to be honest.
[01:00:28] Unknown:
Looks like Seth can't either. So, that brings us to time. Thank you for thank you for, driving the show for for most of it, guys. Apologies for my, my my, timekeeping. You can blame Nosta. And, yeah, we will, be back, next week. And, well, we won't be back. I I haven't told the guys yet or reminded the guys, but I'm actually on holiday next week. So Here we go. I did give you forward warning. I've got the receipts in Telegram. I just haven't reminded you for a couple of weeks. And what's it like to go on holiday every week? I must say. It must be I must be nice. I don't know. For the record, I'm not on holiday right now. I'm in sunny Manchester in The UK. It's far from a holiday.
[01:01:11] Unknown:
That is actually about as far from a holiday as you can get to be fair.
[01:01:16] Unknown:
So, yes, some of us will be back at the same time next week. Thank you for stopping by. Max, don't forget to get the the next scene ready with the outro video because you're the host, not me. Yeah. And I will well, we will catch you all at the same time next week. Thanks, guys. See you. Bye.
[01:01:39] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and art work. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change, and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Jordan, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
Hello. Hello. Hello.
[00:00:07] Unknown:
Hello, and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you who are new here, let me briefly explain what this is all about. Freedom tech Friday is a live interactive show. It's hosted on the ungovernable misfits x feed, Nosta, when it can be bothered to work, YouTube, again, Rumble, when it can be bothered to work, and in theory, supposedly, apparently, Twitch, but I've never seen that. We go live one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on our Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed.
On FreedomTech Friday, we like to cover the latest news trends from anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin, Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. If there's any news items, tools, or topics that can help you take back some control in today's digital Panopticon, we wanna talk about it. My name is not Q and A, and I'm not the head of customer experience at Foundation. He is actually currently on stage, I believe. So I will be covering my name is Max. I'm from the Uncoverable Misfits, and I'm joined by Seth, the VP at k Wallet.
As mentioned, this show is a live interactive show. We rely on you guys to steer us towards the topics you wanna cover or send us the Freedom Tech related questions you want answering. There are many ways you can get involved, all of which really help spread awareness for the show. Comment and ask questions in the live chat, submit topics, questions before the show on X or Nosta, boosting the show in Fountain or any of the other podcasting two point o apps. You can send questions and tips in in Bitcoin or Monero via xmrchat.com/ugmf or just sharing the show.
Sadly, it seems it's bear market vibes, and the audience are participating in that. The biggest boost we had from last show on Kaggi was from Pies who sent a 121 sats and said, salute mushroom strong-arm. Thank you all for your support and sharing with friends and family and for joining us live. So without further ado, Seth, how are you, mate?
[00:02:58] Unknown:
Doing pretty good, Max. Good to have you here. Us us faithful for you. Q and a, teaching us as always. But we soldier on. We soldier on. Where is that robot? Is is it Manchester he's doing? I he mentioned the name of a conference that I have never heard of.
[00:03:17] Unknown:
It's the Infestor.
[00:03:19] Unknown:
Yeah. That sounds right, but I I don't know what that is. So Yeah. Some British thing. Some
[00:03:26] Unknown:
British thing. Yeah. Nothing to worry about, but he's stuck on stage. He'd be shilling some sort of, custodial app or something like that knowing him, and he might or might not join us. So today oh, actually, I missed the last one, the Kagi one. Still haven't caught up. How was that one?
[00:03:46] Unknown:
Oh, man. It was a blast. Yeah. I Yeah. I love getting to to shill really good products, especially ones that are, like, privacy preserving and just improve your life. So it was fun. I basically just, just touted their their services for the entirety of the time and commenced Q and A to try it out. And then we got a we got a we got a retweet from the cocky guys, but email me afterwards and thank me. It's pretty cool. I was glad that we were able to do that and highlight, just a fantastic service. So definitely worth going back and listening to for anybody who did miss it.
[00:04:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm gonna go back and listen because I think I might actually be sold and and finally actually, pay up some sats for it.
[00:04:25] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, well worth it. And don't forget when we talked about this last week too, if you use Notes, Nook, or Inte, I think both, offer some sort of, like, a three month free deal, for Logi. They all, like, partner together and giving deals if you use one and wanna try out any of the others. So you can you can save save money that way.
[00:04:45] Unknown:
That's pretty nice. Vibrant says in the chat, can't wait for Max to be the only Freedom Tech the only one on Freedom Tech Friday. Should be interesting.
[00:04:56] Unknown:
That would not be interesting because I wouldn't be able to answer hardly any of the questions. It would be an absolute fucking disaster, but maybe people would enjoy that. It'd be, like, fifteen minutes. It would just be max rambling. I mean, I I'd be down for it. Let's sprinkle some of those in there every now and then. Like, a quarterly max takeover. You just pick the topic. You ask yourself questions. Answer your own questions.
[00:05:18] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:05:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay. We'll consider maybe We could call it mad max. But you could just be angry about something and rail rail against something.
[00:05:28] Unknown:
Oh, I could certainly do that, mate. Okay. So onto the opener. Today, I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room. Our phones are designed to overwhelm us. Notifications, feeds, emails, group chats, reminders, alerts, badges, it never ends. And the more over and the more overwhelming it becomes, the more data we leak and the less control we have over our time and data. So how do we take back control of our time, attention, and sanity in today's digital world? It is a paradox to suggest that tech could be the answer. Is digital minimalism the antidote?
It's a good topic this week.
[00:06:17] Unknown:
It is. It is. I know I mentioned it before I went live, but this was the first topic that I I launched opt out with more than four years ago, which is absurd Wow. How long that is. But I I think it's it's one of the most important because it's one of those things that, like, it doesn't require any technical skill to jump into the minimalism side specifically. And I find that a lot of people who who tend towards minimalism are already kind of, like, well on the path towards towards privacy when it comes to the the digital world. So I I think it's a really good one to chat through. So I'm I'm excited for
[00:06:49] Unknown:
it today. Yeah. Definitely. Sometimes in, like, simplifying and stripping things out is the best way, like, with everything. Like, not just tech. Like, everything. Like, we're talking just before the stream, like diet. Like, sometimes just stripping things back and simple and things like that. So I think it's good. Dude, you wouldn't even be able to work the livestream. Listen, mate. I'm doing it now. Guess who's working the livestream? Do you think it's the technical wizard set for privacy, or do you think it's this fucking idiot?
[00:07:18] Unknown:
Yeah. We simplified it. Working. We made it max friendly. By by we, I mean, q and a and expatriotic made it made it max friendly. Not me. But I stood there in the corner while they did all the hard work.
[00:07:32] Unknown:
So, Seth, before we start trying to define digital minimalism, I wanna hear your take on how you cope with being online twenty four seven and the endless notifications. No need to talk about tactics or solutions. Just need to hear if it's something you guys wrestle with.
[00:07:53] Unknown:
Absolutely. It's something that I I wrestle with and I think is is kind of an endless war that you have to wage against the just the the horses that run at you in the digital world. It's it's something that, like I mentioned, I mean, I've I've been thinking about this and trying to implement this for many years, but it's not it's not easy because you you're essentially are having to go against what everyone else is doing and what every app and service, well, not every. Most apps and services, especially the ones that are not FreedomTech, they're trying to to tell you that the the path to happiness, the path to satisfaction, the path to to dopamine rushes is the opposite of minimalism. It's installing their app. It's buying their service. It's signing up with an account on their platform.
It's enabling notifications so you don't miss anything important. Every app that you install is begging for your attention. It's begging for your eyeballs, begging for your for your mind, begging for your your thoughts. And so this this is kind of a it's a constant battle, but it's one that I think is honestly the most important to wage because a lot of the the digital havoc that we live in right now, it just it can derail pretty much everything else that we want to do, derail social relationships, like real relationships, derail our ability to to focus and concentrate, derail our ability to be creative, and and invent new things.
And so I think it's yeah. I mean, it it's it's immensely useful. It is definitely something I wrestle with, especially when you're trying to, like, run a company. You're trying to be a high performer. You're trying to, like, stay on top of all of the the newest things that are happening. It's a balancing act always, but it's one that is is absolutely worth worth fighting for and one that I think will just continue to to reap benefits for for you and your family and your loved ones, anybody who kinda takes steps towards digital minimalism. And, honestly, we'll kind of set you up for success in ways that many other people will not have, which is sad, unfortunately, but, obviously, we can try to try to wake up everyone that we can.
[00:10:03] Unknown:
Yeah. So digital minimalism, we're talking about still being able to keep on top of things, still being able to use tech, not just, like, being a Luddite and just, like, not having a phone or anything like that, but it's it's sort of not having that distraction. And, like, the big one that I used to do, and I I'm better at it now, was I made the horrible mistake of, the first two things that I did in life in the morning were, number one, turn on my phone and look at all the notifications and get sucked in. And I'd often lie there, like, just, like, oh, fuck.
Fuck. Gotta do that. Oh, that's gone wrong. Oh, I've gotta do that. Oh, fuck. Fuck. And it sets your mind into this, like, horrible first thought, like, pattern. It disrupts anything, whatever your plans were, you're now going straight into firefighting mode. And then I'd go and get a coffee and continue to read all of it. And it would just put me in this horrible, shitty, unproductive, brain fogged, useless mood, and that's something I've cut out now. And the change just from that one thing, like, minimizing the screen time, I don't turn my phone on in in the morning now. Like, I would just leave it and then go for the next half an hour, an hour, like, sort the things that I need to do in the morning, and then I'll look at it, when I'm sat down and ready.
So that's kind of like a something that I would class as minimalism in terms of, like, minim minimizing your use of it. But how else do you think we could sort of describe minimalism in tech? Like, what would be something that without going too crazy extreme, you could implement?
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it really boils down to kind of how I define freedom tech, where it's technology that empowers you, the individual. And I think that a lot of good freedom tech does this for you. A lot of good freedom tech is minimalistic. A lot of good freedom tech limits your screen time. It doesn't try to to suck you into doom scrolling. There's there's good tools out there that are are useful for this, But I think the the hard part with digital minimalism is, like I mentioned, the the vast majority are are meant to enslave you, essentially, to to eat up your attention. So the way that I kind of see digital minimalism is you're trying to to use the bare minimum of what you need to actually have good relationships, to do well at your job, and to also have fun. But minimum like, going down to the the bare minimum that you can get by with in terms of notifications, in terms of apps that you have installed, in terms of accounts that you have on, websites, in terms of email subscriptions that you sign up for.
It's essentially just, kind of getting down to less is more and viewing that as the the solution to your problems and not more is more, which is really what kind of the the world at large tells you these days. Yeah. So I I think that's it's it's ultimately trying to bend technology to be something that empowers you and finding ways that are most useful to you. So I I think in a lot of this, digital minimalism will look very different from person to person. Some people, maybe you have a job where you you don't need to be always online. You don't need to be in Slack. You don't maybe you have a job where you can really disconnect a lot more than I can. Yeah. And so you could be a lot more aggressive with how you do this. Some people do have a, like, a high performing job or they have a they're running a company or they're doing something where they they really need to be available, and tuning that will be a lot more difficult, but still very possible.
But, yeah, I think it it really comes down to really tuning what apps you actually install, tuning what notifications you actually get, tuning what emails you actually get, and using different tools to actually help with all of those so that you're in charge of your time. You're in charge of when you think about this. You're in charge of when you go scroll Twitter, and it's not everything constantly vying for your attention.
[00:14:16] Unknown:
So maybe it'd be useful then to think about it like, the first thing that you could consider having less of might be devices. And then we can go into from devices down to applications and the software that we're running and, like, decluttering, basically, because that may be something that especially people listening to this, and I've been guilty of it as well. It's like having multiple devices all for all different tasks and different things, and suddenly you get into a, situation where you might have three or four phones and, like, two or three different computers and all this different stuff. And just that in itself actually, is just more to manage. It's more potential data leak. It's more stress.
So is there outside of, like, Graphene and using multiple users? Because we've kind of touched on that previously. Is there any other recommendations around the hardware that you you have or even these these dumb phones for some people? You know? If if you really can't control yourself and you really can't not reinstall these apps, like, is that a potential solution for some people?
[00:15:41] Unknown:
I mean, it's really gonna depend on each person. I think for most people, like, yeah, you don't need multiple phones. Like, for most people, I think if I own a tablet and a laptop or something like that, it's gonna be all that you need. So more is is often not necessary. But I think even with multiple devices, I think you can you can be minimalistic about how you use them, which is the more important thing. Like, multiple devices really is, like, do you have the money to afford the multiple devices? Is it actually a a a wise financial decision? Do you actually need these things is the more important question there? But, like, for instance, I I use an iPhone, and I use a a Pixel with GrapheneOS. On the iPhone, I very strictly limit what notifications I get. And on Graphene OS, I just get no notifications very intentionally. I use that for different things where I I don't want to get any notifications.
And the same for my tablet. I have a daylight tablet, and I, it comes out of the box with notifications disabled, which sounds insane, but it's actually it's actually really nice. Just never even think about notifications on that device. What tablet's that? It's the the daylight, the one with the the really cool black and white e ink style screen, but it's reflective and high refresh rate. And, yeah, it's it's a it's a good device. I don't use it quite as much as I did originally, but, yeah, it's it's still nice. So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily less devices. I mean, maybe. But there's also, like, me, I'm a tech enthusiast. I love trying new things. So I always have different devices lying around that I'm trying out. And I don't think that necessarily is at odds with dinner digital minimalism, but I think it would be more how are you using those devices. Do they actually have a clear purpose? And I think, really, when it comes to, like, too many devices, it would be more on the the home art automation IoT side of things where the trend is put a a Amazon Echo or an Alexa or whatever those are called. I don't keep up with that stuff anymore. Google Home, like, putting those in every room so you always have a screen, again, vying for your attention.
Always have music playing. Like, it's I think that's more of the risk when it comes to multiple devices or, like, too many devices is that you just you never have a, like, a safe space where you're not bombarded by a screen or notifications or, even just news headlines and stuff that pop up on the on that sort of thing.
[00:17:53] Unknown:
Yeah. So, obviously, people didn't think about taking like, definitely to have an echo or whatever, you know, that that kind of stuff in your house. And if you do, then go back to was it three episodes ago? We did the smart home episode. I think it was. Anyways, on the feed. Yeah. But we go into all of that in home assistant and using open source stuff and running it yourself, which I've actually taken Q's advice and ordered loads of bits, so I haven't set them up yet, security cameras and bits and pieces. So, that's worth having a listen if you haven't. But outside of that, probably the device that causes most people the most distraction and waste the most time and enslaves them more than anything else has got to be their phone, hasn't it, really?
And for that, I think outside of deleting apps that you don't absolutely need like, there's the there's the every now and again, I redownload Instagram just because, like, people will have messaged me on there, and then I miss those messages. So, like, every sort of three or four months, I'll download it, and I just realize how unbelievably addictive it is. It's just like it's like crack, so then I instantly delete it again. But so there's those kind of obvious apps that you can just delete and just fuck off out of your life unless it's your job to do it. Things like Twitter, I only have because of work, but it's horribly addictive.
And then outside of those, it's notifications. So any tips on notifications so people can still use these devices but not get overwhelmed?
[00:19:46] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. It it will depend somewhat on what device we're talking about. I I think, like, thankfully, both Android and iOS have a lot of good tools for Mhmm. Helping you to tune notifications. I mean, the the first step is just when you install that app and it asks you to enable notifications, just don't for the vast majority. Like, you you don't need Amazon to notify you when there's a deal. Like, dear god, please just disable notifications. You're gonna be okay. The package is gonna show up on your door when it shows up. You knowing it's out for delivery generally doesn't matter. Like, every single app is gonna ask you for notifications, and it's gonna tell you why they're so important.
They're just it's just an advertising angle. Like, pretty much everything is either they're advertising actual products or they're advertising themselves to you of, like, this is why you should be on Instagram right now because you're missing out on all the fun. You're you're not living the best life because you're not scrolling Instagram right now. Like, just just don't enable notifications for the vast majority of apps. And I think people would be really surprised that even even drastically limiting your notifications in terms of messages and emails is, like, really good for you. Like, one digital minimalism, like, habit that I've leaned on, I'm not always great at it. Like I said, this stuff is always like, it's it's a a battle of personal will, honestly.
So I'm absolutely not perfect at it. But But one thing that has been really helpful is just disabling email notifications entirely even for work. Like, Dick, if you're listening, yes. I I don't get your email notifications. But scheduling a time during every day or I know some people who go crazy, and they do it, like, weekly where you go through and you check all of your emails from the last time that you checked them. So I'm gonna be a might be a problem for you there. Yeah. Yeah. That that would not be a good life choice, I think. So, yeah, I I cannot be that aggressive. But even just saying, like, I'm gonna check them weekly and carve out a time to go through email is so much better for you. Like, so much better for your mental health. Like you said, it helps in the morning where if you get up and the only notifications on your phone are from your family group chats, that's very different than you wake up in the morning and you have 78 Slack messages and 14 Telegram messages and 18 emails to go through.
Instead, take it at your own pace. When you're ready to go check email, you go check email. Now, obviously, that will mean that you have to actually be on top of that, make sure that you do it so you don't miss something important. But something like that sounds really crazy and aggressive until you actually do it, and you realize how freeing it is to get less notifications. The other main thing and I I can't remember. I don't think Android has something like this. One thing that I've really been enjoying on my iPhone is that for those apps where you do want notifications, but you don't want them immediately, they have this, like, notification summary thing where you can just set certain times of the day that you want to get a summary of all the notifications that you missed, and it will just wait. It'll hold all these notifications. And then at that time of the day, it'll give you all of the notifications for those apps. For, like, apps that are, like, lower priority, I still wanna see what they what they have in terms of notifications, but I don't wanna get them immediately. I don't want them to disrupt me. I can say, like, hey. I'm I'll usually at my desk at nine and three. So give me that notification summary at nine and at three if anything that I need. Quite good. Yeah. And it's it's a really nice feature that, again, lets you, like if you can't completely disable notifications for something, but you also don't need to know that minute and you maybe just need to know that day, it's a good solution for that as well. I don't think Android has an option for that, but I may be forgetting it. But that is something unique there. But yeah.
[00:23:28] Unknown:
I recently did similar on my iPhone, but I went way more aggressive. I just did, like, nobody outside these, like, 20 people can actually call me. It's just you cannot. Not from from at at any point of the day, you cannot. It will show me that someone's tried to call me, but that's it. And there's no no notifications for anything at all. I can't remember what the mode is, like, not disturb mode or some kind of thing like that. And I've I've only been doing that for the last sort of maybe month or something like that, but it is actually quite nice because like you said, like, most of the time, nothing's really that important.
And if someone really fucking needs to speak to you, they can leave you a voice mail, and you can check your email when you want. And nothing's flashing or causing you any sort of, like, disruption or anything like that. So, again, not everyone can do it, but, if you can, it's quite nice. Anyone in the chat who has any good tips, I'd love to hear them, or any questions, I'd love to hear them too. We've also got rebuilding a home screen, so moving distracting apps to the last page so they're not right in front of you when you open your phone can be quite a nice one.
Maybe four, five, six essential apps kept on the home screen, like your camera and maps and calendar and notes and that kind of stuff, and then everything else further back so it doesn't distract you. Any others there that you can think of in terms of, like, home screens?
[00:25:19] Unknown:
I know there's you can go pretty crazy on iOS and I think Android too with, like, what things you get during certain times. Like, you can use focus modes to change your lock screen to show you specific widgets and stuff, which which I've never really waded into. But the one thing that I have found really useful, and this is something I've I have on all of my Android devices, is using a more minimalistic launcher. It it's basically gonna give you a lot of what these, like, minimalist phones try to do, where they just try to, like, make it hard for you to do anything. But the the launcher, obviously, doesn't restrict what you can have installed on your phone, how those apps work. But something like olauncher, which I've used for many years on on Android, lets you just have a a basically, a text line with the name of the app. And you can pick however many you want, like up to eight, but it'll just say signal. There will be no icons. There will be no no app drawer. You can search for anything that you want by just swiping down. So it's always easy to get to what you need to get to. But, again, it's trying to help yourself resist the urge to open Instagram. When it's not on your front page, when you don't have a 100 icons staring at you when you open your phone, all vying for your attention, it's a little bit easier. So that that's really, really solid. I've used both Olauncher and Niagara.
Olauncher is a little bit more minimalistic, a little bit more privacy preserving. Niagara is very full featured, and you can do some really cool unique stuff on there. So I specifically use Niagara on my Daylight tablet. It's what ships with it. That's how I learned about it. And then I use Olauncher on my GraphiOS phone. And I find those really, really useful. Unfortunately, there's not anything similar for iOS. But like you said, you could just limit what apps you actually put on your phone. It's gonna take a little bit more self restraint from you. But,
[00:26:59] Unknown:
yeah. Sure. Okay. That's a good one. Vibrant has said, grayscale. Bon has said, some people do grayscale, but I've tried it and can't keep it. I've tried that as well, and I I normally do it like before. I was doing it before night, like, so that I'm not getting the blue light and all that stuff, or at least I don't think I am before going to bed. And on at least on the iPhone, you can set it and then, like, triple click the side button, and then it goes into, gray mode, which is actually quite good.
[00:27:35] Unknown:
That's a good use for the shortcut button. Never thought about that. I'm sure you could do that on on our phones as well to easily swap between it.
[00:27:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Makes me switch nice just just for the evenings. I I do find it annoying because, like, a lot of the stuff that we do with Ungovernable Misfits is quite visual, like the art and all that kind of stuff. And then I'll I'll I'll have it in gray scale, and then I'll suddenly open up some art. And I'm like, I can't actually tell if this is good or not. I need to fucking see some color here. So, I'd yeah. For me, just at least in the evenings, it's quite a good one. What else have we got? Fixing email overload. We kinda covered that a little bit.
[00:28:18] Unknown:
Let's touch on the the algorithmic feeds one. I think that one's really useful. Oh, yeah. Go on. Quick. You jump on that one then, mate. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that I also have done really aggressively, like, I, for a long time, was absorbed in the news cycle and in group chats. We're talking about noise and then noise. That's a good good football.
[00:28:39] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:28:40] Unknown:
Talking about news and, like, it's very easy to just constantly get sucked into whatever the latest thing is, get sucked into doomscrolling, get sucked into algorithmic feeds. And, like, sometimes, again, like I talked about, that's necessary. Like, if you're doing marketing, you're gonna need to scroll Twitter. Like, there are a lot of reasons why you you need to be in the algorithm algorithmic feed world, but I think for most people, avoiding it is gonna be much, much better for you. And it's gonna get you higher quality content. Algorithms are really good at feeding you slop and rage bait and engagement posts and Web scop. Yeah. Stuff that's just not, like, not actually beneficial for you. It's stuff that keeps your attention.
And so shifting away from that and using, like, RSS for most of your news and blogs, etcetera, is really, really powerful. This is what I do to follow all of my favorite blogs, to follow many of my favorite websites. Not all of them support RSS. I have a couple that I I can't get RSS working, and I need to take the time to just build my own RSS feed from them, but I haven't done that yet. But it's it's just a fantastic way to get news, again, at your pace to get only what you want, only from sources you want, and not have to deal with algorithms at all. Specifically on iOS, there's a RSS app called NetNewsWire.
Absolutely fantastic. Highly recommend it. And then on Android, there's a bunch of options. A lot of them have kind of died or aren't really maintained anymore. The best one that I have found is called Feeder, I believe. I'm trying to double check that that's the right name. Yeah. Feeder. It's open source, totally free to use, no no cost, but works really, really well. Like, specifically, I use that on my daylight daylight tablet, because reading RSS on a screen like that is just really fantastic. But, yeah, as Weird said, sometimes finding a site specific RSS feed is really painful. Really good sites would, like, have a link direct directly, but for a lot of them, you'll have to, like, try slash feed slash feed.xml/rss and just, like, try to to find it yourself, which is which is a pain.
But, yeah, RSS works really well. We talked about it all last week, so I won't get into detail. But Coggy News is the way that I ingest news these days. They do a really good job of letting you curate what categories you want. Real people actually define what goes into those categories, and you can also participate in that process. And, yeah, that's just a a good straightforward way to do that.
[00:31:14] Unknown:
Yeah. And, Q's got it down here as well. Social media, browser only to reduce usage. Yeah. That is huge if you can do it. And, like, if if you especially, I think I think if you spend your time oh, q and a has joined. Let me add him to the stream.
[00:31:32] Unknown:
Here he is. A wild robot appears.
[00:31:35] Unknown:
The head robot. Late than that. We how are you doing, mate? What
[00:31:41] Unknown:
what what a fifteen minutes I've had. Sorry to to jump in the flow, guys. I, so that the the panel ran over, so I was late anyway. And then the room that I was promised by the hotel where where this is being held, they gave me some a key to somebody else's room. So I let myself in, and there's, like, a map from the front of people's clothes everywhere. I'm like, I don't think I should stay here. So then I went back then I went back down to the reception. They were very apologetic and they realized that instead of the Hotel Room Number 507, they meant to give me Conference Room 5 also. But then I got into Conference Room, whatever I'm in, and then the hotel Wi Fi wouldn't work.
And then I got myself into the hotel Wi Fi and then got into the green room, messaged Max, and Max didn't pick up my message for another five minutes. So I could have been in much earlier, guys, but, it's a bit of a bit of a mission to get here. Sounds like Max's fault, honestly.
[00:32:36] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's ask the chat if we believe this robot or whether you actually just have that extra pint. Let's have a vote. Just say yes, believe, or no for don't believe that. Silly, silly story.
[00:32:50] Unknown:
He was having Well, unfortunately, I don't have a room room full of, 250 nostrils to back me up. So Alright.
[00:32:58] Unknown:
Fair enough, mate. Well, welcome back. I feel like I've been trying to, do your job very, very poorly, especially as I can't read even though the notes are amazing. So do you want to take your usual spot and take over? Ninety nine waffle. Ninety nine waffle. Oh, and before we do, just just quickly, thank you very much to cowboy Cassidy for tipping 0015 XMR
[00:33:25] Unknown:
and saying thank you, gents. Thank you, mate. That's very kind of you. Well, I think it's, yeah. Thank you for the tip, by the way. Very kind. Yeah. Apologies for, being being late. But, yeah, I I haven't got much context on what you've already covered. So, Max, why don't you carry on for now just with the the show notes, and I'll I'll be the I'll be the guest for a change, and I can take you over when we come to and stuff later. That sounds good. So we've done, algorithmic
[00:33:49] Unknown:
feeds, fixing email overload, and we're on to low noise privacy preserving alternatives. So this is a good one. So, messaging queue, favorite, messaging options.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
And maybe how specifically you, like, tie them into digital minimalism. I think some things here, I think I'm a little curious, like, how they how they specifically fit in. So yeah.
[00:34:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, this this is a difficult one because the the the messaging apps that you use are mainly defined by the where the people are that you actually want to speak to rather than the ones that you may or may not want to use. So I'm probably like you guys where I've got more messaging apps than I need, and I frequently turn down invitations to the next group app Mhmm. Because I just already have way too many notifications. So I I try and slim it down and consolidate as much as I can so that I don't have 5,000,000 notifications from 40 different apps rather. I've still got 5,000,000 notifications, but they're only coming from, you know, a handful of apps, which makes it a little bit easier to manage.
But I use all of the regular ones like Signal, WhatsApp for my norm normie stuff. I don't use Simplex anymore. I don't use Streamer anymore. I don't use any of the Nosta ones. What else do I have? I don't use iMessage. So it it is pretty much consolidated into Telegram and Signal at the moment, which is great. And then the the other thing I do when as it pertains to to messaging apps and, more specifically, digital minimalism is just and you probably already covered this, but just, like, turn off all notifications. Like, there is not a single Telegram chat, including the ungovernable misfits one, sorry, guys, that makes any noise or vibrates in my pocket when it goes off. None of them do.
And I I because I'm in so many groups, it would just become unmanageable. It would be a full time job just to to keep up with them or to just, you know, be distracted by every time one of those chats goes off. So none of them make any sound. None of them vibrate. So it it has to be rather than than, you know, the notification on the phones pinging me, it's me going to look at those apps. And, again, I'm I'm sorry if I'm covering all ground here, but I I kind of try. I often fail, but I try to schedule time to go and look at the what I deem as, like, the less important notifications. So I can tell you what I'm missing.
You can. Yeah. Exactly. Anytime I see Max, that's what it's like. Right down the bottom of the list. Yeah. Exactly. But but no. It's prioritized in such a way that I have, like, some personal chats, like, with you guys that can make noise, and they do make noise. But, like, group chats and things like that, they they just I I have to go looking for them to see what what the latest is rather than them pinging me every time somebody you know, Max is like, oh, look. I broke something else. Can you help me?
[00:36:45] Unknown:
Hey. Listen. It happens a lot less recently, doesn't
[00:36:48] Unknown:
it? To be honest. It certainly does. Yeah. You've you've come a long way. Yes. You've come a long way. Thank you. And and I do exactly the same thing on desktop as well. So Telegram doesn't make any any noise, doesn't interrupt interrupt me on my on my, computer, neither does signal, WhatsApp, any of those sorts of things. Like, I have to go looking for them apart from a select few. And I guess, you know, the other thing I could could cover off as well while we're talking about messaging is, like, priority contacts, so that I've got, you know, obviously, the wife, parents, and things like that, special contacts that even if I'm in a a do not disturb mode, which I'm sure you guys have probably already covered off, Like, they can break through that. And, you know, if they if they text me or call me more than once, then it will get through irrespective of whether I'm trying to block the world out and and get some sleep or just stay away from my phone for ten minutes.
[00:37:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Good shout. We have covered some of that, but it's all important stuff. The other one that we haven't gone into is just, like, setting limits, on specific apps that might take too much of your attention. The obvious ones like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, those type of things. Is that something either of you do, or are you just very disciplined?
[00:38:07] Unknown:
For me, I I've tried it, and it's not enough of a deterrent for the apps that really, you know, get their claws into me, like Twitter and things like that. The only viable fix I found for that really is to just get rid of, like, the native application or make it more difficult for me to access it. Simply me getting a notification say, hey. You've been a naughty boy. You've been on Twitter for seventeen hours today. Like, it's not enough of a hiring for me to be like, oh, fuck you. I know better. If the app is not if the app is not there and the alternative is either me going to, up to my office to get my computer or me going on Brave on my phone to then log in to Twitter web app. Like, that's enough of a of a, you know, hurdle Barrier. Barrier for me to be like, oh, you know what? Like because most of the time when I do that, and I'm sure I'm speaking for for you guys as well and most of the audience, if I put my phone out on it, the aim is to just it's like an unconscious, mindless ten minutes of scroll, scroll, scroll, you know, get some dopamine hits. Yeah. If I've got a lot into something, that's enough of a deterrent for me to be like, do you know what? You can go and do something else. You know? And it doesn't even need to be anything, you know, more productive. It might just be, I don't know, pulling out a crossword app on your phone or doing some Sudoku to actually, like, stimulate your mind rather than just fry up fry up your, dopamine receptors.
[00:39:29] Unknown:
Mhmm. Yeah. And then other ways to make it less addictive or at least simplify things would be the workflows. So what tips have we got in terms of simplifying things down, having less, but still being able to achieve what you would otherwise?
[00:39:55] Unknown:
I think a lot of this is where it comes down to, like, just general minimalism. Like, it's gonna be the same as if you were trying to keep your house, minimally cluttered. A lot of the same things are gonna happen. You're gonna regularly clean up. You're gonna make sure that you don't buy all of those knickknacks to put on the shelf because they just end up being something you have to clean up at the end of the day. Like, a lot of it is is the same when it comes to the digital world for me where it's it's really limiting. Like, we talked about a little bit earlier, but we we can go into more detail. It's limiting what apps you actually install, leaning on browsers instead, as much as possible. Progressive web apps are really, really useful for this as well.
But I think for me, one thing that I do really like on, at least, Graphi and OS. I don't know if it's a general Android thing, but at least Graphi and OS. You can tell it to actually automatically, disable apps that you don't use frequently, and it'll tell you what apps, it disables when it does that. And that happens a lot more frequently than you would realize. Like, I think a lot of times when you look at your phone and you go through the apps, you're like, oh, well, I think I, like, I might need that. I I use that sometimes, and you don't realize, like, you haven't opened that app in six months. Like, all you're getting by having that app installed is you're being tracked more than you would be otherwise, and you're taking out space on your on your phone, and you're being distracted every time you scroll through your app list by things that aren't actually useful.
So I think a lot of it is that. I think you you could also be more specific and, like, you don't need seven notes apps. You don't need to be using probably signal, simplex, session, white noise. You probably don't need, like, eight chat apps that are all gonna be giving you different notifications. Like, I think a a lot of that will will go into play as well. But
[00:41:37] Unknown:
And notes wise, notes Nook is still the favorite for both of you, isn't it?
[00:41:43] Unknown:
For sure.
[00:41:44] Unknown:
That's the go. So you can just have just have that and nothing else and fuck everything else off.
[00:41:52] Unknown:
Yeah. That that's what I do. Did you guys oh, quick shout out to the to the gang, Bond, zapped, 2,121 SAT and Kieran, of zap.stream. Thank you for your service, sir. Zap, 121 SAT as well. Thank you very much. Did did you have you guys talk about, like, focus modes,
[00:42:11] Unknown:
particularly on iOS? I don't know. Did. Yeah. We did. We went into well Not a lot. We went into, like yeah, you can jump in if you want, but we did cover, like, going extreme and, like, blocking everything and then being more granular with them. And then I think didn't you mention some other, like, what was the what was the thing you mentioned, Seth, where it was, like, adjusting the view of how you see things as well?
[00:42:41] Unknown:
Oh, just that, this is focus modes on iOS. You can, like, change your lock screen based on what focus mode you're in to show different things. But I'm definitely curious how you use different focus modes queue because it's it's something I think I don't lean on as much as I should. I definitely use just, like, do not disturb pretty regularly, but I haven't really tuned anything else. So I'm curious.
[00:43:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Something I've used I'm starting to use a lot more at the moment, especially a little bit more granular. So, full on do not disturb when I go to bed. That's scheduled. I don't even have to think about it. That just means that I don't get any notifications on screen at all with the exception of my trusted contacts. So, like, if the wife's out, she needs to call me, she can break through that. I've got another one, for it's literally called work chat off. So I can just flick that on when I've kind of had enough of reading the work notifications, which, you know, in the distributed global team is essentially twenty four seven. You can quickly find yourself sucked into doing an extra two hours work in the evening if you're not very kind of vigilant with that. So I've I've got a focus mode there that essentially just stops the, virtual office application that we've got, from pinging me, essentially. So it's like do not disturb, but just for a single app so that everything else is able to break through because I'm still, you know, in my free time in the evenings, etcetera.
I've got another one for fitness. So if I'm going out for a run, my phone's not gonna be going off and interrupting my music. Or same if I'm in the gym, like, the work chat's not gonna be pinging, etcetera, etcetera. Again, that's all automated. So if I start, like, a workout tracker, on my watch or something like that or on my phone to say that I'm heading to the gym, then, that would automatically, you know, turn itself on and just reduce those interruptions as well. And then the other one that I have is kind of like a work filter where I'm in, like, a, you know, deep focus mode, which essentially turns off everything apart from phone calls, and the work application so that, you know, if I've got, like, a couple of tasks that are pertaining to to what I do at Foundation, then, you know, you guys in the Telegram chat or somebody on Signal can't just pop in and disrupt my workflow, essentially. So I've got loads of different ones. I probably use all of them, at some point each and every day.
And some of them or most of them are actually scheduled so that they come on automatically when I'm taking, or starting a, you know, a certain activity wherever possible at least. And I found, you know, huge benefits to that, because it might not sound a lot. You know? People's never, kind of gone into this and gone down the rabbit hole of kind of trying to, you know, maximize your focus time and and limit your interruptions. Just the fact that your phone pings, and it's a signal message or a WhatsApp message or something like that doesn't sound like a massive interruption if you're deep into a work project or something like that. And I guess that could be true if you're very, very disciplined and and are, I guess, disciplined enough to, you know, see it and ignore it. I personally am not, and that's why I need these focus modes so that my phone just doesn't go off in the first place.
And the same goes for my you know, everything I've just said is is also applicable to my laptop as well. So I've have all of the same sort of focus modes as well. I'm just not disciplined enough to be like if if my phone goes off, I might see that, oh, it's a message from Max and be like, yeah. Ignore. But the fact that I've now got my phone in my hand the fact that I've now got my phone in my hand then then leads me to be like, oh, I'll just have a quick check on Twitter, and I'll just check, or see what the Bitcoin price is. And then I'll just, what was that note I made about doing the shopping later? And you've quickly wasted twenty minutes on your phone, and then you're like, ah, shit. Like, you know? Yeah. So for me, prevention,
[00:46:23] Unknown:
is is the best cure. My inbox says I have all notifications off on my phone except alerts for the company. I actually have exactly the same or I was just saying last couple of weeks, all notifications off, and no one can call me outside of about 20 people. Just can't do it. And that has been a a massive win. And, he also says signal can be handy for daily quickie notes. That's was it one of you who mentioned that to me the other day? It's like note to self or something like that.
[00:46:52] Unknown:
Yeah. It's, I think Seth and I both do it. We it's it's an easy way to get, information from your phone to your computer. Yeah. Or, obviously, you know, storing something for later, you just need message to self. Yeah. I I use that every day. It's really useful. If we wanna hop into questions, I'm not the host, Mac, so you can either try and figure out how to do it, or we can just not bring them up on screen, and I can read them out from the notes.
[00:47:20] Unknown:
Why don't we do that? Not not bring them up on screen. We'll just read them out.
[00:47:24] Unknown:
Because I I Yeah. They Because I've I have a little win at the moment where I've hosted and nothing's currently gone wrong, I just don't wanna tempt fate. I just wanna have one win. Oh, I appreciate that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. That makes sense. Well, if you're listening to the livestream and you've got any digital minimalism or productivity hacks or tips for us or any questions, please do drop them in. We've got another ten minutes now. But for in the meantime, I'm gonna hit, some of the presubmitted questions. First one, bit of a tongue in cheek question, but, it's from what why Wyatt Serp. What's up?
How cooked am I if all my family's photos auto upload to Google Images? And then you've got a clown emoji. So I think this is kind of like a jokey question, but I wanted to answer it anyway because, there there's probably people listening to this that do, unfortunately, do that. I mean, yes. It's great that they're all backed up, but it's not great that they're all backed up to to Google's, to Google's cloud where they they are quite open and honest about the fact that, you know, they're they're not very private, especially from Google. And I guess anytime that you store anything that's not encrypted on somebody else's server, there's privacy trade huge privacy trade offs to that, but also, trade offs in terms of, like, they could get out. And when you're talking about photos of your kids and things like that, that is just not a trade off I'm kind of willing to make. So, yes, I know you probably it was a little bit tongue in cheek. But, yeah, if you're looking for an alternative, for me, it would be Proton Drive, Evidence and to an encrypted, etcetera.
Yes. It's a paid service, but, with Google, you're paying with your privacy and with ProOn, you're paying with Alternative as well.
[00:49:06] Unknown:
Oh, I know what you're gonna say. Yes. I'm glad you bring in the There are multiple. I may say a different one than you think. But if your family are all using iPhones, you could help them to enable advanced data protection and set you as a recovery contact. And then their photos going into iCloud photos are Internet encrypted. Obviously, that does require the ADP step, which may be too much, or if someone's not on a not on an iPhone, which everyone using Google Photos implies. Maybe they're not on iPhones. But I know a lot of people who use Google Photos even though they're on an iPhone, which is a little weird. So that may be an option. The other one, of course, would be Entei, which is is really good, and I think it's the closest experience to Google Photos, that I've tried. But yeah.
[00:49:55] Unknown:
Sorry, guys. My connection's a bit spotty here, but I think I'm back now. What have we got? Ready to prepare asks, how much digital minimalism belongs to the choice of the correct launcher on your phone? I don't know whether you guys cut this off before I, joined, but it's a good
[00:50:13] Unknown:
question. Yeah. We did touch on, Olauncher and Niagara specifically. I think just generally, like, I think it's it's very useful. But just like everything else about digital minimalism, like, if you really wanna get around it, you'll get around it. Like, you you do have to also just make it, like, a personal choice even when it's difficult to stick with that sort of thing. But I think it's it's a great first step to minimize how easy it is for you to get into those doom scrolling apps to to only present yourself with the ones you absolutely need, the ones that are less time sync.
So it's definitely a good first step.
[00:50:48] Unknown:
And I guess what the the iOS alternative to that would just be, I guess, widgets maybe and getting rid of as many apps as you can. Like, there there's no there is no concept of a launcher per se with iOS. So it's it's gonna be a lot more of a not not necessarily, I guess, a manual process, but, less of a customizable process where you can have certain information, you know, in widgets or in stacked widgets, which I know is is, quite popular. But outside of that, like, you ain't gonna be able to get, like, a a list. Like, I think it is that the one where it's just black and white text with a a lot of your applications? Like, I don't think you're gonna be able to get something like that, on iOS. Correct me if I'm wrong. No. Not at all, unfortunately. Okay. Another one from ready to prepare.
Wearables. Are these items the opposite of digital minimalism by definition? I would say yes in short. But then, again, everything that we've just spoken about today can be applied to wearables as well. Like, you you can still manage what notifications reach your wrist or or whatever else you've got there. It comes back to that discipline piece. But I guess one of the main features of these wearables and why people do wear them is that they can have their notifications on their wrist. So it is, by definition, I guess, you know, at loggerheads with digital minimalism, but that's not to say that you can't have one and still kind of use it, in such a way that it doesn't act as a time sink. Like, I have one. I use it mainly for fitness.
It never pings. It doesn't have I don't have any notifications or anything like that on there because of all of the reasons that we've been talking about today, but it I I'm kind of a bit of a fitness fanatic, and the trade off of me having to do that and manage all of those, or turn off all of those notifications is enough for me so that I can see that, you know, I'm getting faster at my running or whatever else it is that's kind of, important to me. But I don't know what what your guys' takes are on the the wearables piece. You so you're saying you have a wearable, but you just turn all the notifications off? Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you, yeah, if you ping me on Signal or Telegram, like, it ain't most of the time, it ain't getting to my phone, and it never ever gets to my watch. Okay.
[00:53:07] Unknown:
And is there around wearables then any advice on, maybe, like, the privacy side and everything of doing that? Like, some are gonna be much worse than others. Some are gonna link into all these other, like, fitness apps and wanna share with someone on fucking Facebook that you've just got up and done a sit sit up, like, way with, like, clapping hands emojis. Like, is there a way to do this without have having, like, leaking all of this data and also distracting yourself so much that you're one of those twats who sits in the gym and just stares there, watch your phone, and does fuck all?
[00:53:45] Unknown:
Yeah. It I I think the the the first piece is obviously gonna be driven by your phone. Like, if you're an Apple user, you you kind of have two choices. You get an Apple Watch or you get a Garmin, and have a a lesser experience. Lesser in terms of, just one sec. There's somebody, just on the door. Just hang on a second, guys. And they're gone. Yeah. So it's driven mainly by your phone, most of the people that have the wearables. There's obviously gonna be trade offs. It's literally a tracker that you attach to your body. Again, some people might argue that's a feature, not a bug because one of the main things is for tracking your health, your metrics, your running speed, etcetera, etcetera.
There are steps that you can take, depending on the application, of course, that you can take to limit your privacy. If you're doing it in the Android ecosystem, you can kind of, especially within the Graphene ecosystem, you can ensure that any companion apps do not have access to the Internet so that whilst your watch might be sending all of the data back to your phone, let's say let's just call it companion app one, you can just limit that application so that it cannot talk to the Internet. So you can prevent the fact that any of your data is is it's only going between your watch and your phone. Obviously, there's still some trust, assumptions there because it's, you know, it's a complex beast, But you can definitely, there are steps that you can take, or choices that you can make so that you can have a little bit of both worlds where you're able to have all of these metrics if you're, you know, a bit of a fitness nerd. We'll also do that in a somewhat of a privacy preserving way.
[00:55:23] Unknown:
On the, backup stuff that I can see in the chat going on, and we've talked about this a lot with, like, family photos and bits and pieces. It might just be because I like hardware more. But is there not a simple solution for, like, say, you're running Android and you've got all of your photos on your phone that you could because you don't have the expandable memory, could you not have, like, a simple device where you can just dock your phone once a week or once every few days, and it just backs up onto an actual solid drive or, like, backs onto two or something like that rather than having to rely on some version of a cloud, however it's set up? Is there not, like, a more old school physical way?
[00:56:14] Unknown:
I don't think so. I mean, not in one that not in a way that would be more, like, automated like that. I mean, you could literally just, like, plug in a a drive over USB c Yeah. And do it. Like USB fixes this. Yeah. I mean, it it it works. I I Yeah. Wouldn't want to, like, go select all the images since last time and do it all. So, I mean, you can you can be your own cloud. Like, you can host your own next cloud or image or something like that. I don't I don't feel like there's a reason not to do something like that. But, I mean, like, I've talked about personally, I just I don't want to self host this. I don't want that responsibility. So I'm I'm happy with using a cloud as long as it's intent encrypted. Like, that's the whole that's the whole thing. If they can't access my data, only I can. I think that's a a win win that I don't have to host it. I can support a good company, and I can get all the functionality that comes with that as well. Yeah. Fair enough.
[00:57:18] Unknown:
Final question. It does tells beautifully into what that's just been talking about. Because
[00:57:31] Unknown:
Missing most of that, unfortunately, Hugh. Yeah. Unfortunately,
[00:57:35] Unknown:
Hugh is still actually in a third world country. So let me just have a look through because his Internet is terrible. We'll look through what question he might have been asking. I can't see what question he was did you say Kazani or something like that?
[00:57:54] Unknown:
I'm Oh, here we are. Sure. I couldn't make that out. Yeah. Kazani,
[00:57:57] Unknown:
BitChat or White Noise and why? Neither, I think. Isn't it?
[00:58:04] Unknown:
I mean, they're absolutely unnecessary for the vast majority of people. I think BitChat is interesting only for the use case, in my opinion, of protesting in a place where you don't want your cell phone to be exposed. You can put it on airplane mode and just do chats over Bluetooth. Really useful for that. Or for, like, hyperlocal, like, you're at a conference. Like, you're at a conference and you want to do questions for the audience in the room. Like, that's the other cool use case I've seen. For normal messaging, no. I don't understand why they're adding, like, Noster based worldwide messaging. It's really stupid. We don't need another messaging app. White noise is very interesting in the cryptography they're using.
It's, like, the only thing that's interesting outside of signals protocol, basically, when it comes to privacy for messaging. And so that's really cool. Their usage of Nostred relays as the network is, I think, going to prove to be a bad idea, but we'll we'll see on that. But, again, it's you're kinda like if you're already using signal or something like that, like, why would you switch? There's not really any reason. You're gonna lose all the network effects that signal, already has. And you don't probably need another messaging app. But I do really like what Wet Noise is trying to do. It's just I've gone through the whole thing of like, I try every messenger app under the sun, and I have them all posted on my side. And I have to juggle 18 different privacy preserving messaging apps, and it's just not fun. So I'm definitely a minimalist when it comes to that now.
[00:59:34] Unknown:
Hey, guys. Sorry. Hotel Wi Fi, very spotty. I got booted out. That wasn't the question from Kazani, so I will let's recover the last one on a couple of things, and we'll we'll keep the answers very brief. If you are forced to keep exactly one cloud syncing service for the rest of your life, that includes photos, notes, contacts, everything, which single service would cause the least long term regret from a digital minimalist perspective and why? For me, it has to be Proton if it's all encompassing. I know you mentioned notes there, and Proton doesn't necessarily have a a notes function, but it kind of ticks all of the other boxes.
I guess, I I like the the company ethos. I like the fact that they have Nintendo and encrypted. Most, if not all, of the clients are open source, and it's reasonably priced.
[01:00:22] Unknown:
Yeah. Can't argue with that, to be honest.
[01:00:28] Unknown:
Looks like Seth can't either. So, that brings us to time. Thank you for thank you for, driving the show for for most of it, guys. Apologies for my, my my, timekeeping. You can blame Nosta. And, yeah, we will, be back, next week. And, well, we won't be back. I I haven't told the guys yet or reminded the guys, but I'm actually on holiday next week. So Here we go. I did give you forward warning. I've got the receipts in Telegram. I just haven't reminded you for a couple of weeks. And what's it like to go on holiday every week? I must say. It must be I must be nice. I don't know. For the record, I'm not on holiday right now. I'm in sunny Manchester in The UK. It's far from a holiday.
[01:01:11] Unknown:
That is actually about as far from a holiday as you can get to be fair.
[01:01:16] Unknown:
So, yes, some of us will be back at the same time next week. Thank you for stopping by. Max, don't forget to get the the next scene ready with the outro video because you're the host, not me. Yeah. And I will well, we will catch you all at the same time next week. Thanks, guys. See you. Bye.
[01:01:39] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and art work. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change, and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Jordan, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
Welcome to Freedom Tech Friday
Dem Phones
Defining Digital Minimalism
Less Devices
Taming Notifications
Hard Boundaries
Escaping The Algo
Simplifying Workflows
Q&A: Google Cuckin'
Q&A: Do minimalist launchers really help?
Q&A: Are Wearables Anti-Minimalist?
Q&A: BitChat and White Noise - Neither
Final Q: One Cloud Service to Rule Them All
THANK YOU
