How to block porn on a Mac — and why most methods last a week

Method 1 — Screen Time on macOS

Screen Time exists on the Mac too, with the same Content & Privacy Restrictions and the same "Limit Adult Websites" switch:

1. System Settings → Screen Time, turn it on.
2. Content & Privacy → Web Content → Limit Adult Websites.
3. Set a Screen Time passcode.

It filters Safari and disables Private Browsing. Then the same limits as on iPhone: it's a website filter, not a category filter at the network level; it doesn't touch what apps show; and the passcode is yours, resettable with your Apple ID. Useful as a first layer. Not a lock.

Method 2 — Editing the hosts file

The classic. You open Terminal, edit /etc/hosts and point a list of domains at 0.0.0.0. The sites stop resolving. It costs nothing and it feels technical enough to feel serious.

Two reasons it fails. First, it's a list. You block the sites you know; the next one you find is not on the list, and the list is never finished. Second, you edit it back with the same command you used to write it, and you remember it, because you wrote it. The hosts file is a promise to yourself in a text file.

Method 3 — A filtering DNS resolver

Better. Instead of a list you write, you point the Mac at a resolver that refuses whole categories — pornography, nudity, adult themes — for every app and every browser on the machine, private windows included. This is the right tool: it's the same mechanism SELFCNTRL uses.

The weakness is not the filter, it's the setting. System Settings → Network → DNS is a text box you can clear in ten seconds, and any VPN app replaces the resolver on connect. The category filter is right; it's just attached with a sticky note.

Method 4 — SELFCNTRL for Mac

The SELFCNTRL app for macOS installs the same DNS category filter, in a few minutes, tied to your account. It brings what a bare DNS setting can't: the curfews that cut the internet entirely at night on a schedule you set once, the pace (cut it dead, or four locked days a week that climb to seven), forced SafeSearch on Google, YouTube and Bing, and the day counter. Tightening applies at once; loosening waits twenty-four hours, and the floor never drops.

One honest line, because you'd find out anyway: the lock that physically cannot be taken off — the one we put $100 behind — is the supervised profile on iPhone and iPad, where Apple gives us the mechanism to make a profile immovable. macOS doesn't offer the same for a personal machine. On the Mac you get the same filter and the same curfews, and the block sits inside the same account, with the same twenty-four-hour delay to loosen. In practice most relapses are on the phone, at night, in bed. That's where the immovable lock goes.

The setup that actually works: every device, one account

A block on the Mac alone is a block with a phone next to it. The setup that holds is the one where every device you own points at the same filter:

1. Create your space with one email address.
2. Lock the iPhone first — it's the device that's with you at 2am. Plug it into the Mac, run the supervisor, scan the QR code. Ten minutes. See the iPhone guide.
3. Install SELFCNTRL on the Mac. A few minutes.
4. Set a night curfew — typically 11pm to 7am — on both.

After that, there's no door left to watch. And nothing to open each morning: it just runs.

What it never does

No history is read or stored: the filter works on categories, so there is nothing to log. No report goes to anyone, no accountability partner, no shared dashboard. Your Mac stays yours — the app restricts, it doesn't look. Details in the privacy policy.