my digital minimalism
i would consider myself as a minimalist. not as a hardcore minimalist, but someone who tries to minimize it`s belongings and questions the current consumerism. but here i wanna write about my minimal approach to the digital life.
first of all for me it is about having the control about my digital life. to not be controlled by software or your devices. this idea is not new, but it is new to me and i got it from richard stallman. he is the founder of the free-software-movement and has a very good ted talk external link icon youtube icon about his ideas and the free-software-movement. so i would highly recommend it to you, if you dont know him or the free-software-movement. free is in this context not meant as you don´t pay for software it is meant as a broader freedom. but this is just one aspect of my digital minimalism. and free software is not inherently minimalistic. maybee i will write also some entries about this topic, because at the moment i am more and more getting into it and starting to realise the diffrence between open source and free software.
i would describe my digital minimalism as asking the questioning if i really need this and if not i should look for an alternative for every software and devices. this is my ideal when it comes to my digital life, but i am certainly not perfect and i still have a long way. but at the moment i feel like i developed a special setup on my devices. a setup i want to share and write about.
lets start with my smartphone.
I still have the default android which was installed on my smartphone. but in the future i also want to change it to a free (as in freedom) alternative. but other than that my smartphone is very diffrent. first i use a different kind of home screen manager. a minimal one, where i don`t have the standard home screen with all the apps and its icons. my home screen just contains 2 diffrent screens. one the main one, where my mostly used apps are benchmarked and one second homescreen, where all the apps are listed in alphabetical order. in both screens there are no icons and it`s just made out of two colors. so it is very minimalistic. for this i use a paid app called minimalist phone external link icon but you can do this with none paid and free software if you search for it. i cannot give any advise on that because i only tested this one. i have also bought it years ago when it was cheaper. now i would not buy it again
with the app there also comes some other good features which i turned on. for example you can set up a blocking time sceme for certain apps. i have for example configured it so that instagram gets blocked at 22:30 so that i can not use it during the night. i have also turned on a kind of mindfullness feature for apps like instagram. before you can open it you have to wait 10 seconds, but i am not sure about the correct timing. i have combinded this feature with the native feature that i only can use instagram for 30 minutes a day. and from the minimalist app there also comes a function where you have to declare how many minutes you want to stay in the app. after this time is over there comes a big pop up which asks you if you want to leave or to stay longer in this app. this setup don`t sounds like digital minimalism. it more sounds like a kind of rule set for a digital detox, but this is my way to get the control back over these apps. apps like instagram are designed to make you addictive, you always have to remember it and it was a long way of thinkering and experimenting for me, but i now feel good with this and i know without that i will be even longer at my smartphone and the programms will control my time, but i rather have it the opposite. i control how much time i spend on instagram.
the other big step into digital minimalism is the part where i think about and decide what function should have my smartphone have. what do i want it to do and what not. for example i decided that i don`t want to watch youtube on my smartphone anymore, so i have disabled the youtube app. i think in the most pre-build android systems you even can not delete it entirely at least not in the normal user interface. just another reason to move to an android alternative. but as you might also know youtube is programmed to be addictive and to make money out of you aswell. so after i disabled the youtube app i still caught myself watching youtube, but instead of in the app i watched it in my browser on the smartphone. and then i started to reflect that and to question my self do i really need a browser? finaly i came to the conclusion: no. and this was a process of thinking which lasted some weeks.
i really thought about it. why do i have a browser installed on my smartphone in the first place? do i really need to search for things everywhere or can i just do all of this on my laptop when i am home or at work? a browser nowadays comes as a preinstalled app on the smartphone. i even think you can not delete google chrome completly (just to make clear also on the smartphone i changed my standard browser to brave). so "do i need a browser?" is not a question we asks ourselves. it is just there. and this is what i meant with i want to decide which functions my smartphone has. you can even say: i want to decide what purpose i want to give my smartphone. and i decided surfing completely freely on the web is not a part of this (anymore).
my next question was: are there moments where i really need a browser? and the answer is yes. in some situations you have to have a mobile browser to be involved in the normal daily live. for example some restaurants don`t have printed menus anymore. so you need a qr-code-scanner and a browser to see the menu. yeah of course i can use the smartphone of someone else, but i don`t want to be depentent on others in this matter during my daily life.
is there a workaround? yes there is, but not an easy one. let me explain. in most of these scenarios you need to scan a qr-code. you don`t have to search something, you just need to scan something. so i looked up if is there qr-code-scanner-app with an integrated browser. and i found nothing. so then i looked for a minimal browser, that just opens links and nothing else. and i found nothing. not nothing exactly. i found a reddit post where some people talking were about the very same problem, but they had also no answer to the problem, except code it yourself. i even asked chat-gpt and it gave me the same answer. but it said also: if you want it, you have to code it yourself. at first i was like: i never coded an app and for sure not a browser, but could i do it?
i started to vibe code it and it was really really easy, because android has a function for displaying websites. i added some small minimalist functions, like displaying the url and copy it, or some privacy features and some features you know from browsers: like zooming gestures or a download manager. which also was very easy because android also has functions for that and most of the code was done by chat-gpt. but thats it. i think you can even say that this app is not a browser, because you can not freely browse the web. you can not search for something. the url bar is not writeable. you can only open a url from a link or a qr-code and navigate through this page. nothing more and nothing less. and this is just what i wanted and due to the fact that i vibe coded it, i know the code. i know how this app works, more or less to be honest. but it is in my control!
the whole process of refecting this topic, the reasons, the development and how it`s going now can and should be another blog post. cause it sounds like a small step and it kind of is a small step but it has really impacted my life to not having a regular browser on my smartphone. and i think it is very special and i like it very much. so i will and want to write more about it.
this whole post is longer than i expected so i think i need to do at least a part two. cause i didn`t even finished my setup on my smartphone and on the other hand i didn`t even mention my setup on my laptop. so either i will make this a longer post or i split this all into diffrent parts. but i think i prefer another part. so that this part can be put online.
see ya