Turning my ESP32 into a DNS sinkhole to fight doomscrolling | Hacker News Reader

Turning my ESP32 into a DNS sinkhole to fight doomscrolling

amanvir.com

105 pointsvenusgirdle40 comments

If you have someone who you trust deeply and who cares about you, consider setting parental locks on each other’s devices. On iOS and macOS it’s dead simple to set up. The Lenten season is coming up and my wife and I have decided to both give up social media completely until Easter. Much like celebrating Christmas is a good time for goodwill, it can be a good season to try giving up something you feel is not good for you.

I’ve decided I’m going to spend my free time using making a ground up point and click adventure game with my kids. We spent about two hours on it this weekend and my girls (six and ten) were howling with laughter. It’s cool to see my oldest drawing up plans for what she wants each room of the game to look like, and what she wants to be able to do. All very exciting and new. GitHub copilot makes making it almost trivial, just spun up vite with typescript, created a canvas element, and off to the races.

I was never addicted to social media, but I used to be terribly addicted to YouTube. I tried various blockers, and none of that worked. In the end I told myself I'm going to quit for 1 month and see. It's a long enough period, where you can't just distract yourself with other things, but it's not long enough to feel like you're losing something. Not to preach, but it worked for me, and I've applied it successfuly in other places like eating habits. You commit to 1 thing at a time, and see if it makes your life better.

> and I've applied it successfully in other places

There is a positive effect to quitting without too many crutches or aids. Not so much that you learn how to do it, but that you realise that it can be done, it's not that bad and it will make your life better.

I agree. If you need to set something up (like a DNS sinkhole) to trick yourself (and you know how to disable it to get back to scrolling), it'll take actual willpower to truly stop.

And what happened after? Did you stop using YouTube altogether or you can now moderate your usage?

I did a similar experiment quitting YouTube and reddit for a month last year. By the end of the month I didn't feel like I missed it much and thought that it wasn't a problem for me anymore. Unfortunately, with time my usage started to ramp up again.

YouTube is still useful, so I didn't cut it out completely. I have an RSS feed for channels I'm interested in, and sometimes the only good search result is a video. The feed is for noise control only. I find that I now negatively associate impulsive YouTube consumption, and I'm conscious of when it happens, so I catch myself almost immediately.

If your usage ramps up, and you catch yourself scrolling for the sake of distraction, then don't beat yourself up, just repeat the process. I'm sure I'll need a reminder too.

I’m in the process of loading up my instance of FreshRSS with my MVP YouTube subscriptions, with plugins to allow videos to be viewed inline, sans anything relevant to politics or news. It will be the final algorithmically determined feed that I am routinely exposed to. I left most social media for good over 12-years ago (I am an early adopter, even in cynicism about the societally damaging potential of social networks).

The benefit of having a chronological feed that consists entirely of plain text headlines cannot be overstated. I can feel a tangible difference in how I engage with news and information that’s presented without the usual “tricks of the trade”. I am going to setup accounts on my system for friends and family, but I wish there were a more straightforward mechanism for doing this, and I fear that Cloudflare, Discord, and actions from the big players in this game will take actions to prevent this kind of separation of content from its platform, but for now this is working well.

1. Why an ESP32? Its a bit of an odd duck I would think. Can it withstand a month of DNS bombardment from your phone?

2. As the wifi credentials are part of the code, and its set up as a station, this is only going to work at home without port forwards? Leads me back to point 1 sort of. Its an ultraportable lightweight DNS server you need to recompile to move.

Its a cool implementation it just sort of comes off as a solution seeking a problem.

> 1. Why an ESP32? Its a bit of an odd duck I would think. Can it withstand a month of DNS bombardment from your phone?

The advantage is that it is really, really cheap and low power.

They are cheap enough that I keep a supply of ESP boards just in case I want to throw something together.

Yup, that’s the reason! Had one lying around my house (I’d originally bought a pack of them at a really cheap price)!

Great project. Use what you have is as good as any reason.

I deleted social media apps (IG, TikTok, Reddit, etc.) from my phone a few weeks ago (about two weeks ago perhaps).

The only one that I wish could be deleted is YouTube (because of YT Shorts), which comes with every Android. For now, I've restricted my usage using the App Timers feature.

WhatsApp Statuses sadly cannot be disabled. I wish I could fully delete WhatsApp for good[0]. Telegram Statuses feel wholesome. I admit I have a pet peeve with how Meta engineered WhatsApp after purchase.

I'm not feeling any withdrawal symptoms of any sort. If everything continues to be like this, I'm looking forward to finishing 2025 like this. I've been looking at dumb phones, E-Ink ones seem promising, but not yet quite there. Maybe also drop in a dumb Casio watch.

I did not delete my social media accounts, as I don't want anyone grabbing my public handles and wreaking havoc. I will always reserve these, even for leaving them empty.

I'm fine with HN being my social media.

[0]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/goodbye-whatsapp

All Android apps can be disabled, even if they can't be uninstalled.

You're right, though I consider that the workaround and not the actual solution.

Also, some apps cannot be disabled depending on the vendor. e.g.: Weather (which launches random notifications from time to time), Radio, etc.

To use Whatsapp only, without all the other useless features, try using Beeper. Also works to use instagram messaging without having the instagram app itself, therefore no doom-scrolling. It's open-source.

Try ReVanced YouTube, you're able to disable anything related to shorts with it :)

+ Adblock + Sponsorblock + Return dislike button + lots more

> For the uninitiated, doomscrolling is essentially when one passively scrolls through endless feeds of content on social media until eventually stopping to realize that they've wasted the last five minutes of their life doing something entirely unproductive.

This is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

"Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media."

In other words, doomscrolling is about scrolling the bad news, specifically. Like covid-19 or war.

If you read the 2nd paragraph of the very article you cited, you'll also see it says:

  "Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping."

[citation needed] :)

Anecdotally, I've heard the term "doomscrolling" being used by a reasonable number of different people in different circles to refer to passively consuming "bitesize" content (e.g. social media, short text posts or short videos) for extended periods of time, regardless of content.

If you look at the definitions on Urban Dictionary[1], the ones from 2020/2021 are in the same vein as what you've described and what Wikipedia says, but more recent 2024/2025 definitions generalise the concept and lose the "negative news" element.

Always fascinating how language evolves and how quickly the meaning of words can change.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...

"This is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling"

Yes, wikipedia is wrong, it happens.

Policies work great for encyclopedic content. But it turns out that finding a source for a new term does more to cement an early meaning of the word than help people understand its evolution.

Maybe try urban dictionary?

http://doomscroll.urbanup.com/18433219

Nailed it

I appreciate this effort as a fun project for personal profit, but for readers who'd like this kind of DNS sinkhole, or more general - DNS filtering proxy, there are much easier options. Just search for Pi-Hole or AdGuard Home. They can easily be run on a Raspberry-compatible device, on some routers or NAS devices, the easiest as a Docker container, or even a tiny VM in cloud for a few dollars. They have nice web interfaces and offer great customizations.

And if you don’t want to worry about hosting it yourself, NextDNS is easily one of the better ways I spend $20/year.

How's gonna work if the request is already cached or when using DNS over https?

It won’t. Especially when you use private relay on an iPhone, it won’t use local DNS (except if the requested domain isn’t found, it can probably still route local domain names?).

Could you not just set this up on the router itself?

I live in an apartment, so this unfortunately wasn’t an option for me!

In my experience slight blocks work better. If your blocks are absolute you are just going to circumvent them, possibly out of need.

Think about a time when the internet or your battery went out, wasn't that a relief actually?

So just serving 99% of requests, taking 1 minute breaks, or degrading quality after 1 hour of peak usage, all work for me.

Neat idea, but my takeaway is I had no idea that DNS also runs on UDP/53.. I always thought it was TCP only! #TIL

The author cites it as performance reasons, but at this scale, even the uplink to cloudflare, would be negligible, no?

That’s odd because DNS is the quintessential UDP-based protocol. “From the time of its origin in 1983 the DNS has used the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for transport over IP.”. DNS over TCP was only introduced as a later addition (admittedly, in 1989).

With 'normal' DNS, UDP with the default and TCP is used if the packet size becomes too large. There are other TCP-only variants such as DoT (DNS over TLS) and DoH (DNS over HTTPS).

I don't think the performance would matter much with some basic caching (or even just OS-level caching), but there is limited memory in an ESP so maybe that is it. I have never noticed issues with DoT and DoH which are theoretically much heavier protocols.

> I always thought it was TCP only!

So did the NIH firewall administrator:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229201

Huh, I didn't know it had a TCP option, I thought it was UDP-only.

Nice writeup. Was this built to be used with multiple devices? IIRC at least older jailbroken iDevices let you modify /etc/hosts, which you can use for the same purpose of blocking specific sites.

There is a setting in YT to disable shorts.

How? I've looked for this in the past and it wasn't a feature...

There is not, but you can use a uBlock Origin filter.

I built something very similar to this too, but in Go. My motivation was that running Pi Hole was just way over complicated for something that should be simple and light weight.

* Fetches block lists every 6 hours

* Gets DNS requests over DoH then serves as DNS over the VPN.

* A single Go binary, so it's exceptionally easy to run.

It was super interesting to play around and get working as a side project, and as a plus debugging deadlocks in a DNS application is always fun /s

Setting up a Docker container with Pi-hole being more difficult than writing a filtering DNS proxy. Interesting.

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