(trying to) finally get off social media + announcing my flight log
january 08, 2021
Even though I don’t use the internet very much for non-research purposesᵃ, and try to stay on gemini and the smolnet, there are a few places that I still visit for entertainment regularly (although I should and am trying to stop).
[a]: i still use it to look up documentation, find software, etc, as well as for school and work. i don’t think this usage particularly harmful (mentally and privacy-wise) as long as you have strong adblock and browser protections.
the cancer of the internet
youtube
I watch youtube—watch, not browse. I watch a selection of channels that I know have quality content, using mpv + invidious. Browsing youtube, even with a privacy-protecting frontend, is a recipe for slowly decaying your brain. How it’s somehow worse than other social media is a mystery, and yet it’s true. I’m scaling down my watching anyways, I only watch new videos from RedLetterMedia, YMS, 3blue1brown, and NileRed at this point.
twitter & co, facebook & co, etc.
these go without saying.
reddit is a shithole. i almost exclusively use it for use animal picturesᵇᶜᵈᵉ (just don’t look at comments) and even then it’s hard to handle sometimes. I will admit I do still look at a few linux, privacy, and (sadly) memeᵉ subreddits.
[b]: my multireddit for big cats
[c]: my multireddit for bugs and invertebrates
[d]: i used to have a multireddit for bats and birds but now i just look at r/batty
[f]: luckily mastodon and discordᵍ/signal chats with irl friends are replacing reddit as my meme supply line [g]: bleugh
fediverse
i think this is why i’m still generally opposed to the fediverse, because even if it doesn’t have the evil intentions that twitter (or whatever your program of choice is modeled after) has it perpetuates many of the bad aspects by virtue of being modeled after Explorative Media Company. if you want something that’s truly good and respects it’s [sic] users you can’t start out modelling it after something bad and exploitative.
Despite not really liking it, I still use mastodon a lotʰ, I’m just careful to keep my feed carefully curated and I mostly use it for ranting^Wstream-of-consciousness posts about computers and the internet. Even then, it’s still annoying and addictive (see previous quote), so I try to moderate my use of it.
[h]: @nytpu@tilde.zone joined may 2020 and has 316 toots and counting
rss
I read webcomics and various blogs (of quality comparable to gem/phlogs), I feel that’s an innocent usage, and with the magic of rss it means I can just stay on miniflux and read everything.
my flightlog
I created my flight logⁱ in an attempt to get myself off of the fediverse, but after only a few days it’s turning into a middle ground between the short shitposts on fedi and long-form, semi formal gemlog posts. Despite this subversion of the original purpose, I do still like it. My brain refuses to let me write anything on my gemlog that doesn’t meet a minimum amount of effort, I guess I feel that it needs to be at least decent quality and long to justify posting it. The flight log gives me a middle ground to write shorter snippets on what I’m thinking about without needing to go through the whole thing of a gemlog post, but with a more serious tone then on fedi, which is essentially a place for me to complain about things, shitpost, and post memesʲ.
[j]: these three reasons probably the most compelling reason for me to get off of fedi, but I digress.
ending my (recreational) internet usage forever
I’m a long way from this goal still, but the end result of all my extra-webular activities is to eventually have little or no activity on the web. I might still watch a few youtube videos (using my rss reader and mpv of course), look for cute animals on reddit, and do various researches (looking up documentation, etc) on the web, but that’s it. I’ve tailored my gemini subscriptions to give me a good amount to read each day (without being too much), plus I have stuff on rss, various mailing lists, irc, and I’m hoping to do more non-computer things like readingᵏ, catching up on my extensive movie and tv show watchlistˡ, and just going outside, taking picturesᵐ, going on nice walks.
[k]: i already read /a lot/ and yet i still want to read more [l]: not much better than using my computer, but i have several hundred (reportedly) amazing movies on there so i want to get to watchin’