Slowly unlatching from social media addiction
"Sure, buddy" is what I expect a lot of people to think by this title.
And yes, in most cases one most succesfully curbs an addiction through going cold-turkey, but I can't do that. Besides not just being able to do that however, I'm also not sure it would benefit my efforts if I did.
Admittedly I'm not very involved in CS or IT or anything involving advanced programming and code.
"What does that have to do with anything?"
EVERYTHING. Well not quite, but it does hinder my ability to find good alternatives to things, and when I do, it's usually after a lot of searching and heachaches - trying to understand the mysterious language and vocabulary of programmers as a plebian normie. Almost all redirects to a github page with no further instructions given are an immediate pass, regardless of how revolutionary this app might be for me and my routine.
Regardless of the previous rant, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I got F-droid and repository connecting down, I've found my people and communities that I participate in more than I ever did on mainstream social media like instagram, tumblr, etc, on mastodon, lemmy and pixelfed, I've learned to organize the information that matters to me with an RSS Reader, I tried and use both protonmail and tutamail (ik there are more out there, cut me some slack), and Beeper has finally gotten to a more useable point so any reason to keep Instagram installed has flown out the window which has also really helped me fix my attention span and find some damn peace of mind.
In my most recent venture, after getting even more pissed off and done with youtube and the infinite comment doomscroll spiral I fall into every time I'm on there (not to mention the inescapable shorts and the annoying algorithm rabbitholes), I've decided to distance myself from youtube almost completely. Currently I'm sorting through my subscribed channels, getting rid of the channels I don't care about or are detrimental to my mental health (like, and not limited to, drama channels), and finding new channels to subscribe to that actually release content about my IRL interests, useful information, generally things that will help me be more productive and enrich my online activity.
While I do use Peertube, I've been using some Youtube forks(? i'm trying so hard to use the proper terminology, someone send me a CS dictionary), namely:
- NewPipe
- Grayjay
- And not a fork, but the Enhancer for Youtube extension on Firefox.
I don't care how much more customizeable and interconnected and whatever Newpipe could be, I REALLY LIKE IT. The simplicity of its' layout is just so... calming. It's one of those app interfaces that made me go "ohhh yeah, those digital minimalists know what's up".
Grayjay also, admittedly, isn't bad at all. But I'm not going to lie, if I don't see myself using it for any features it has that NewPipe doesn't, I'm probably going to uninstall it.
Welp that's where I'm at with my journey. I have done a few more things on the side that I forgot to mention here (like changing keyboard apps, etc), which I might get into more detail in another post. For now though, I'm heading to bed. Got something to say? Tips? Suggestions? Lecture me on mastodon.
Glad to be back, bearblog.