The Trap
It started with a pattern I couldn't ignore.
Jonathan Haidt, on the erosion of teenage mental health. My daughters' phones lighting up every time someone posted on Snapchat or Instagram. The pressure young people carry from an online life that looks perfect while theirs doesn't. The fact that social-media companies borrow the same mechanics as the gambling industry to keep you in the feed. And my own anxiety level dropping when I cut back my feed hours.
Our phones are killing us - with constant alerts, reminders, and calls to action that add zero value to our lives.
The starting point was an attempt to aggregate social media accounts. One quiet place instead of five loud ones. The harm of constant feeds is reasonably well researched now as a key factor in anxiety increases across age groups.
It turns out this is really not possible given the pricing structures and limits on programmatic access. The platforms aren't built to let you out. The algorithm is the product. Ad revenue pays for all of it.
The platforms aren't built to let you out.
The Wrong Fix
After hitting a brick wall on controlling social media feeds, another angle was needed.
The core principle underlying everything is reducing engagement - allowing time to organise activities and events that are in the real world with real people. To break the cycle of doom-scrolling would logically have benefits of anxiety reduction, for a start.
Blue Zones - regions across the world where longevity is prevalent - share a set of common attributes. Community. Real human interactions. Frequent time in the natural environment.
Development of an app, now part of MostliHere as Mostli Real World, began. Plan real-world activities. Share them with people you already know. Nobody can find you - there's no central directory. No streaks. No alerts. If you had things planned yesterday, we just mark them as completed. It's the opposite of punitive: we assume you did everything. If you didn't, it doesn't really matter. You look forward all the time, not back.
But it's easy to fall into the same traps you are trying to get out of. Messaging, nudges, encouragement streaks - all sound nice, but it's essentially more of the same.
We assume you did everything. You look forward all the time, not back.
The Right Fix
The biggest drain on us is the proliferation of apps to do simple things on our phones. All disconnected, all pinging us with alerts and reminders separately, constantly.
Most of the apps on our phones are utilities - specific functions. Some are simple, like calculators and trackers. Some more complex, such as advanced task management. Anything free is harvesting your data and serving you ads to keep its lights on. The apps don't know about each other, and there's no common view even if they are date-driven.
MostliHere is attempting to fix this.
Even for people who are busy and focussed on productivity, some kind of unified view gives them a sense of calmness. MostliHere doesn't send alerts and notifications. You open the app. The Today screen has the things you want to get done. You click into each mini-app and address the particular task or event type. For the productivity-obsessed, the unified view is a small daily dose of calm.
We can't calm you down completely, but we can help reduce the constant noise.
For the wellness-obsessed, same deal. Have your water tracker, meal planner, workout tracker, habit tracker all available from a single list. Turn off all the notifications. Simple screens that do the main functions of the individual subscription apps you already have - the ones you're paying $5-$10/month each to use hardly any of.
For people who want to build their own system, Notion is a great choice - it's totally customisable. That's also why it fails for so many people: it's a blank canvas. They don't want to build anything. They just want functions that work.
MostliHere is 25 usable functions. All of them reachable from Today or Favourites. 14 are free. The other 11 are Premium - $2.99/month, or $24.99/year, with a 14-day free trial. No ads. All data on the device. Private. Forever. Even on the free plan, your data is yours. On the paid plan, the look and feel is yours to customise too.
At its core, it's designed to reduce phone-induced stress, however that's happening for you. Many solutions, for many people. You organise your life outside your phone. Watch how you feel - and if you want to, there's a mini-app for that too.
Andrew
Founder, MostliHere