3ndarchy

How I am re-discovering ways to enjoy the Internet without the stress

I work in technology. Fun for me involves sitting down behind a keyboard, opening up a terminal session, tunneling into a VPS via SSH, and going to town. Or playing with encryption, steganography, ciphers, and more.

Yet by 2020, social media and all that it entails has absolutely made me hate the internet. It's not entirely just social media either, it's even social gaming, anything involving being social on the internet inevitably turns into a dumpsterfire, or at best, just not fun.

So what is a nerd to do?

Well, I can tell you at this point that it's an adventure for sure. But it also feels REALLY good.

1) Delete Social Media Apps

So while I haven't gotten to the point of deleting my accounts, both my public-personas and my semi-anonymous ones, I have go through and deleted the apps: Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are all off my phone. Why? On my device they become siren calls to bring me back into the shit world of shitposting, toxicity, and general things I hate. So, off they go.

That doesn't mean I never go on them any more (although Facebook is on the way out entirely). But when I do, it will be intentional, sitting down at a computer or through the browser on the phone. To accomplish a task or follow breaking news of some kind. Not to bask in the permanent hellsite that they are.

2) Deleting work email from my phone

It's helpful to have my work email on my phone. However, my work provides me with both an iPad and a Macbook, so I don't have to have it on my phone. If I need to keep track of something happening, its going to happen on that device. So, no more emails during dinner time for things I can't do anything about anyway.

4) De-Googling

Okay, so this is going to be the hardest part. How do I successfully, completely de-google my life? The answer is I probably won't be able to entirely. But I can start moving my life away from Google as much as possible. In the next few months I'll have major choices to make like do I install GrapheneOS or do I stick with Google's loaded OS? The answer, frankly, is not one I'm capable of making right now. Unfortunately there are too many apps in the Android sphere that I rely on. However, how many do I really need on my phone? That's going to take some work and some intentional inventory of wants, needs, and can-live-without. It will probably also involve a lot of finding FOSS work arounds to replace things. There are a few paid apps that I do use, and use a lot, that I'll have to see, again, if I can live without.

5) Finding new/old ways of doing things

When you work in technology, you find yourself slowly but surely falling into one of two camps: the camp that never changes anything because, if it's not broken why fix it... and the bleeding edge camp, always ready to dive into the new thing. I found myself in the latter camp because, well, I was always expected to support, directly or indirectly, every new thing on the planet. So as a consequence of that, my entire life had become a messy disjointed tangle of ways to do things, various services or things that were supposed to make my life simpler were actually, come to find out, just making a plain-ol' mess of things. Webmail is a prime example. Same exact interface across multiple devices, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, it's there and exactly the same. Only... it's crap. It really is. Another thing is apps for every damn thing. Every news outlet having an app with notifications, every single thing out there “there's an app for that”. Why does there need to be an app for that?

So, I figuratively pushed everything off the counter and started from scratch.

Mail: What do I want? Above all, I want it in preferably one place. Not 20. So, in comes Thunderbird. Thunderbird is great because it also allows me to dive into IRC again when I want to shitpost on snoonet about politics or talk to people about a problem I'm encountering on the Ubuntu freenode. But I can take it or leave it, it's not integrated into the experience of reading the news.

In this I am also returning to the use of RSS for my news diet. Although, I am leaning more toward using my freshly installed nextcloud instance to take care of that. With it I'm also throwing in some new and long-lasting webcomics that I had missed because... well, let's face it, if it didn't notify me a long time ago, I missed out on the fun because I had to remember to go to the website. So now, RSS keeps me in the loop.

I am also playing around a little bit with Newsgroups thanks to Eternal September still having access to the old-fashioned text only newsgroups (since Newsgroups is now a filesharing experience). And just as I figured it was mostly cantankerous old farts shitposting their racism all over the place. But, there are a few newsgroups still functioning as they should.

I mentioned a moment ago Nextcloud. That's part of my de-Googling strategy, although primarily it's going to be for the groupware aspect of it versus the file storage (I just don't have the coin to pay for multiple terabytes yet for family storage of photos and everything, although I am looking at eventually building my own in-house hardware Nextcloud instance to transition everything to.

Slowly the internet has started to feel fun again. Like a fun tool, like a place I can control a what the firehose throws at me. I even found some oldschool BBSes you can still telnet into.

I don't need to wade into every single little cistern of toxic sludge anymore, I can actually enjoy the technology. Most importantly, I can do it more on my terms.

That feels good for the brain. Feels good for the soul.

What ultimately contributes the most to these things is transitioning my phone from being an always-on outlet of that firehouse to pushing more and more things to dedicated devices. Eventually email will probably not be on my phone at all, it will be something I sit down and access later on. I don't know entirely yet. What I do know, though, is that I'm going to be making those choices for myself and not letting the industry or market dictate everything.

It's time to free myself from the shackles of the tech giants and unplug myself from the godawful world that the internet has become.