2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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#+TITLE: How I Internet
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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#+SUBTITLE: Self hosting other advantages
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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#+AUTHOR: Yann Esposito
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#+EMAIL: yann@esposito.host
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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#+DATE: [2019-09-23 Mon]
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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#+KEYWORDS: blog, self-hosting, web, zen, minimalism
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#+DESCRIPTION: How I protect myself against attention grabbers and many social media anti-patterns.
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#+OPTIONS: auto-id:t
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#+begin_notes
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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TL;DR: Self-hosting is not only about controlling your data, it also influences
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how you consume Internet for the best.
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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- I /POSSE[fn:posse]/; Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere:
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+ I own my data I self host my blog, notes, my repositories, my bookmarks, etc...
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+ I use espial[fn:espial] for self-hosted bookmarks and notes
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+ I use note-red[fn:node-red] to publish my blogs, bookmarks and notes to
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twitter, sync bookmarks with pinboard[fn:pinboard]
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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- Enhance not only publishing experience but consumption of Internet
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+ read Digital Minimalism[fn:dm]
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+ Control notifications
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+ Control real-time interactions
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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#+end_notes
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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The way I and most people use Internet as changed drastically in a few years.
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It started with social networks and smartphones.
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More recently, applications started to introduce "features" targetting our
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"lower brain" or "social brain".
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It is not unusual to stay a lot longer on our smartphone than what we
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expected.
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One solution whould be to get rid of those applications, platform.
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But they provide a real benefit.
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Another solution is to better control our relation with them by minimizing
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our exposition to the worst features, while taking advantage of the really
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useful ones.
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I describe how I try to do that myself.
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It start with how I produce info, then what are the consequences on how I
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consume the Internet now.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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[fn:posse] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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[fn:dm] http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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[fn:espial] https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
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[fn:node-red] https://nodered.org
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[fn:pinboard] https://pinboard.in
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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2019-09-23 08:01:34 +00:00
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* Producing
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: producing
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:END:
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This is how I produce most information.
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Mostly have a self hosted service on which I keep my data, then syndicate
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what I want on different platforms.
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** Articles: Self hosted blog
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: self-hosting
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:END:
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I wrote an [[file:new-blog.org][article]] sharing the details about my currentl blog platform.
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I also describe how I intend to provide a respectful blog.
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Technically, this is not the simplest path, still it is really efficient.
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In the end there are a lot of solutions for generating static websites.
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The harder part is about self-hosting it.
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You need to buy a domain name, and configure you DNS correctly.
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This is not something tremendously hard, but don't expect to do that as
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easily as registering to a private service.
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** Code: Git Broadcast
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: git-broadcast
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:END:
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Self hosting is not reserverd for my writing but also for the code I write
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on my free time projects.
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All my public repositories push to both on my self-hosted Gitlab instance
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and GitHub.
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That way I host my own content, while still using to my advantages the
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social feature of Github.
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Here is how you can configure your git repositories to push to multiple
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urls:
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#+begin_src
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git remote set-url origin --push --add <remote-url>
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git remote set-url origin --push --add <another-remote-url>
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#+end_src
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** Bookmarks: Espial
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: espial
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:END:
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[[https://github.com/jonschoning/espial][espial]] is an open-source, web-based bookmarking server.
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It is a very easy to install single binary.
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This is perfect if you want to keep a lot of bookmarks some private some
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publics.
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** Notes: Espial
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: notes--espial
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:END:
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Notes, are simply text you save, you can make them public or private. I
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tend to use it as my "micro-blogging". For the time when I just want to
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write a short remark and not a full blog post article.
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** RSS for articles, bookmarks, notes
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: rss
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:END:
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It is important for me to provide an RSS feed.
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People should know when I update my blog.
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I am not fully satifisfied with the state of my curren RSS feed.
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It does not contain my full articles content, nor an eay mean to filter by
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keyword or category yet.
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Still this is good enough for my current usage.
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[[https://github.com/jonschoning/espial][espial]] is written in Haskell, and I made a few pull requests to add RSS
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feeds of my public bookmarks as well as an RSS feed for my public notes.
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** Syndicate Elsewhere: node-red
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: node-red
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:END:
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[[https://nodered.org][node-red]] is a tool that make it easy to write /flows/.
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I use it to syndicate my self-hosted content to social media platforms.
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Each time I save a new public bookmark, a new blog post, a new note, I
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tweet it.
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* Introduction
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: intro
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:END:
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Our usage of the Internet changed a lot in recent years.
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The book Digital Minimalism[fn:dm] explains quite clearly how Internet
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and many social platforms are really useful but at the same can harm us.
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The harm mostly come from social anti-pattern that are mostly hacking our
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brain.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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More precisely our lower part of the brain, the one close to the instinct
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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which is quite difficult to tame.
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This is why this is the preferred target of those "brain hacks".
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Anti-features are:
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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- *notifications* ; they are here to grab your attention when you are away
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doing something else.
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- *likes / upvotes / retweets / pokes...* ; they are here to provide a "brain social
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sugar". They are not really useful but make us feel good by reinforing
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our feeling of social approval hacking our "social brain".
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More than that, we generally fall for most psychologic trick with those
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and make our production oriented to short content, mêmes, etc...
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- *comments* ; Unlike likes or retweets, comment are a lot more useful,
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they can start a discussion. They still have two problems:
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1. Public comment are subject to spam, troll, attacks, etc...
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2. Generally comments are associated to real-time notifications, and thus
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break a slower, calmer, more respectful communication channel. We are
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not all meant to react instantaneously.
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My solution to take back the control, is to generate the content using my
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own tools and broadcast those content to all other social media.
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If people react to this on some social media, I'll get a mail that will be
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put in a "social" folder.
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I forbid myself to constantly check this social folder.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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I do not have any social media application on my phone.
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Everything goes through my email, filtered in some folder.
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I only check those notifications in my email once or two times a day.
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Sometime I only check the social mail folder once in a week.
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As a result, I receive almost no notification.
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I am almost never interrupted for those social interactions.
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The main drawback of course is that I can give the impression that I am
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rude by not answering immediately.
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Unfortunately I am just protecting myself.
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If I feel this is a too big problem, I'll create an auto-responder bot that
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will nicely explain that I am sorry for the inconvenience but I can make a
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long time to answer.
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So being on the Internet, and in particular on the Web is mostly about
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consuming information and producing information.
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* Consuming
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: consuming
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:END:
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Internet consumption evolved a lot.
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Just think about the few first pages you visited a few years ago and today.
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People tend to consume on their smartphones and generally inside a social
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media platform dedicated application.
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You are generally presented with an inifinite scroll media content.
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Most of the time either video or photos.
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Sometime with a link to some website, often behind a paywall.
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And a lot about things easy to digest.
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A cute cat, an image with a joke, a funny video, and once in a while like
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very rare, a real important information about someone you care about or a
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big news.
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Most of the time, the news will be part of a polemic.
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Because polemic is a very efficient attention grabber.
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While I am totally fine with a bit of entertainment and polemic, the level
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at which we are currently exposed right now can be quite harmful.
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First thing to think about, why are we so eager to /news/?
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Why not feel the same about old but great content?
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Before all those news system, we were /active/ during our information
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consumption.
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We started from a search engine and /searched/ something.
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Now, we still use search engines, but it is really about searching and not
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trying to /discover/ something new.
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This is also something to keep in mind.
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** News
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: news
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:END:
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So my entry point to news consumption are:
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- highly selected RSS sources (for example HN posts with > 500 upvotes)
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- [[https://lobste.rs][lobste.rs]]
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- [[https://pinboard.in/popular/][popular pinboard.in bookmarks]]
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- very few sub-reddits with small volume
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- [[https://laarc.io][laarc.io]]
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- [[https://fermatslibrary.com][Fermat's Library newsletter]]
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I plan on generating RSS from those different sources with "smart filters".
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Typically number of upvote filters for lobste.rs, laarc.io, sub-reddits,
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but also number of bookmarks in popular pinboard, etc...
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I really enjoy staying inside emacs as much as I can.
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This is a clean, dense, text-oriented environment.
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*** Emacs elfeed
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: emacs-elfeed
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:END:
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As I said, one of my most useful tool to get news is RSS.
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In particular I consume it inside Spacemacs using [[https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed][elfeed]].
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I also use elfeed-org to organize my feeds ans I also take care to remove
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feeds with too much volume.
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Generally we shouldn't read more than a few articles a day.
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** Mail
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: mail
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:END:
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I also use my mail to get most of my notifications.
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And I generally put the social notifications inside a folder and not
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directly in my inbox.
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That way I do not get any direct notification.
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I check my social notifications once in a while.
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** Github
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: github
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:END:
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I still get notifications on Github because I use it a lot for my work.
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But only email and web notifications, not desktop notifications.
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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So even for Github, I can take a few days to react.
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2019-09-16 09:42:49 +00:00
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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* Conclusion
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:PROPERTIES:
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:CUSTOM_ID: conclusion
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:END:
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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So I described how while still using centralized social media platform, I
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still own my data, I protect myself from new attention grabbing features
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and design / UX pattern changes in those platforms.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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Mostly, I take the positive aspect of those platform while not paying most
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of the negative price.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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For now my system is quite tailored made, and adapted to me.
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I think we could imagine that we could offer that to more people by having
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a single, easy to create platform.
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The bit sad state, is that I know there are a few system that try to make
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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it easy for more people to self-host, or provide self-hosting for a smal
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community or family.
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But this is still reserved to technical people in my opinion.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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I think we could be inspired by espia to create a simple small platform to
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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provide those feature to most people.
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- ability to blog/microg blog and syndicate
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- ability to publish securly private infos to a small group of friends and family
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- generate RSS for different group of peoples
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2019-09-20 13:05:56 +00:00
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I would personally prefer that to a Federation platform (like Mastodon).
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Unfortunately the federated network mostly replicate the anti-features of twitter, facebook,
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and other social media platforms. While I believe we should change our
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consumption habit.
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RSS is already a great tool for that.
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2019-09-19 21:36:20 +00:00
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