her.esy.fun/src/posts/how-i-internet.org

#+TITLE: How I Internet
#+SUBTITLE: (POSSE) Relaxing the Internet experience
#+AUTHOR: Yann Esposito
#+EMAIL: yann@esposito.host
#+DATE: [2019-09-14 Sat]
#+KEYWORDS: blog, self-hosting, web, zen, minimalism
#+DESCRIPTION: How I protect myself against attention grabbers and many social media anti-patterns.
#+OPTIONS: auto-id:t

#+begin_notes
*Sorry for the late reply*

Don't take it personnaly if I do not answer immediately to your comments or
questions.

I do not receive notification from most social media or even mail.
I do not have any social-media platform application on my phone.
I almost never check social media platform except GitHub.

I check my mails once in a while.
Sometimes a few times a day, but sometime only after a few days.

It is a protection against real-time notifications, and urgency feeling
that is harmful fof most people.

---------

TL;DR:

- I /POSSE[fn:posse]/; Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere:
  + I own my data I self host my blog, notes, my repositories, my bookmarks, etc...
  + I use espial[fn:espial] for self-hosted bookmarks and notes
  + I use note-red[fn:node-red] to publish my blogs, bookmarks and notes to
    twitter, sync bookmarks with pinboard[fn:pinboard]
- read Digital Minimalism[fn:dm]
- Control notifications
- Control real-time interactions
#+end_notes

[fn:posse] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
[fn:dm] http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/
[fn:espial] https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
[fn:node-red] https://nodered.org
[fn:pinboard] https://pinboard.in

* Intro
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: intro
:END:

Our usage of the Internet changed a lot in recent years.
The book Digital Minimalism[fn:dm] explains quite clearly how Internet
and many social platforms are really useful but at the same can harm us.

The harm mostly come from social anti-pattern that are mostly hacking our
brain.
More precisely our lower part of the brain, the one close to the instinct
which is quite difficult to tame.
This is why this is the preferred target of those "brain hacks".

Anti-features are:

- likes / retweets ; they provide no more benefit for us except we feel good
  by this social approval.
- comments are useful, the problem with comments is they generate a
  notification or if not, generate us to check quite often if our output
  has generated social approval or not.

Now I control the social inputs from those social medias.
I receive almost no notification.
I do not have any social media application on my phone.
Everything goes through my email, filtered in some folder.
I only check those notifications in my email once or two times a day.
It is not exception that I don't check those for an entier week.

The main drawback is that not answering immediately to feedback can make me
look like a rude person.
I am just protecting myself from realtime and sychronous social interaction
on Internet.

* Producing
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: producing
:END:
** Self Hosting
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: self-hosting
:END:
The first important step is to self host most of my data.

Unfortunately this is not as straightforward as it should be.
The very first huge obstacle is owning a domain name and configuring the DNS.
It is WAY too complex to buy and control easily your own domain name.
I mean, once used to it, it is quite easy.
But I can't imagine someone not very used to computers to be able to
do all of that for himself in less than a few hours/days.

I wrote an [[file:new-blog.org][article]] sharing the details about my currentl blog platform.
I also describe how I intend to provide a respectful blog.

** RSS
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: rss
:END:
It was important for me to provide an RSS feed.
So people can follow my blog via an RSS reader.
For now, I am not fully satisfied with it because my current system only
provide links but not the full content in the RSS feed.

But this is good enough for posting news later.

** Git Broadcast
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: git-broadcast
:END:
How I push to both my self-hosted repository and GitHub to take advantage
of all social features offered by GitHub.

I also self host a gitlab instance locally.
That way I have an infinite number of private repositories.
I can share my code to anyone.

The main drawback of my self-hosted gitlab instance, is that this is not a
social platform like Github is.
So I duplicate all of my public repositories to Github and my origin is
configured with both my own gitlab and github.
Each time I make a =git push= the push is broadcasted on both my own gitlab
instance and on GitHub.
You can configure broadcast push with:

#+begin_src
git remote set-url origin --push --add <remote-url>
git remote set-url origin --push --add <another-remote-url>
#+end_src

** Espial
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: espial
:END:
[[https://github.com/jonschoning/espial][espial]] is an open-source, web-based bookmarking server.
It is a very easy to install single binary.
Perfect if you want a self-hosted bookmark web application.

This tool is written in Haskell, and I made a few pull request to add RSS
feeds of my public bookmarks as well as an RSS feed for my public notes.

Notes, are simply text you save, you can make them public or private.
** node-red
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: node-red
:END:
[[https://nodered.org][node-red]] is a tool that make it easy to write /flows/.
I use it to syndicate my self-hosted content to social media platforms.

Each time I save a new public bookmark, a new blog post, a new note, I
tweet it.
* Consuming
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: consuming
:END:
So far I explained how I syndicate my content on multiple platform on the
Internet.
The main advantage is I own my data and all platform only get the link to
my content.
** Emacs elfeed
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: emacs-elfeed
:END:
One of my most useful tool to get news is RSS.
In particular I consume it inside Spacemacs using [[https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed][elfeed]].

I also use elfeed-org to organize my feeds ans I also take care to remove
feeds with too much volume.
Generally we shouldn't read more than a few articles a day.
** Mail
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: mail
:END:
I also use my mail to get most of my notifications.
And I generally put the social notifications inside a folder and not
directly in my inbox.
That way I do not get any direct notification.
I check my social notifications once in a while.

** Github
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: github
:END:
I still get notifications on Github because I use it a lot for my work.
But only email and web notifications, not desktop notifications.

So even for Github, I can take a lot of time to react.

* Conclusion
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: conclusion
:END:
This is how I can still use mainstreamsocial media platform while not
allowing those to optimize their attention grabbing algorithm on me.

I just take what I find positive in them, but do not pay the price of the
negativity of those platforms.

For now my system is quite tailored made, and adapted to me.
I think we could imagine that we could offer that to more people by having
a single, easy to create platform.

The bit sad state, is that I know there are a few system that try to make
it easy for more people to self-host, or host to a friend, smaller community.
But this is still reserved to technical savy people.

I think starting from espial we could create a simple small platform to
provide those feature to most people.

- ability to blog/microg blog and syndicate
- ability to publish securly private infos to a small group of friends and family
- generate RSS for different group of peoples

For me this is kind of superior to federation and mastodon, etc...
Mastodon, unfortunately replicate the anti-features of twitter, facebook,
and other social media platforms.