Begone Social Media

For years, social media was something I had, not something I worried about. That was until the era of short form videos…

I joined Facebook in 2007 and used it a lot. Back then it felt exciting. I uploaded pictures from my life so friends could see what I was doing, and they did the same. Over time, however, the feed filled with more advertising and less life. Eventually it felt like ads and slop had replaced the people I knew, and those people gradually stopped posting too.

Instagram made even less sense to me. Strangely, I was a hobby photographer and carried my camera almost everywhere, yet I never felt drawn to put those photographs there.

After the Covid years, around 2023, I started using Instagram chat more often. Reels were waiting beside it.

At first it was one funny clip. If I was bored, I might watch another. One became four, four became twelve, and somewhere along the way an occasional distraction became a habit.

I could come home from work, lie down on the sofa and start watching. Then I would look at the clock and, lo and behold, it was two in the morning.

That was not how I wanted to spend my evenings. The social network I had never considered important had hooked me with cat videos and funny clips, one tiny reward after another. I knew I had to change something.

So how could I fix it? Social media sites use domain names, and I already had a way to block them.

I used Home Assistant for other automations at home, and Pi-hole for ad blocking. That was when I put two and two together: I could make a social-media blocklist in Pi-hole and let Home Assistant turn it on and off.

Once the idea clicked, I went off to code it.

A few moments later, I had a working proof of concept. I called it No Social. Home Assistant turned the Pi-hole blocklist on automatically at 22:00, blocking the social-media sites on my list. At 09:00, it turned the list off and opened them again.

That was the whole idea. Home Assistant decided when the gate should be closed. Pi-hole closed it. The dashboard button let me take over whenever I wanted.

For me, that red button became a quiet victory. I had seen a habit I disliked, admitted that it had more power over me than I wanted, and changed my surroundings instead of waiting to become a different person. My evenings felt like mine again.