11 KiB
How I Internet
TL;DR: Self-hosting is not only about controlling your data, it also influences how you consume Internet for the best.
The way I and most people use Internet as changed drastically in a few years. It started with social networks and smartphones. More recently, applications started to introduce "features" targetting our "lower brain" or "social brain". It is not unusual to stay a lot longer on our smartphone than what we expected.
One solution whould be to get rid of those applications, platform. But they provide a real benefit. Another solution is to better control our relation with them by minimizing our exposition to the worst features, while taking advantage of the really useful ones.
I describe how I try to do that myself. It start with how I produce info, then what are the consequences on how I consume the Internet now.
Producing
This is how I produce most information. Mostly have a self hosted service on which I keep my data, then syndicate what I want on different platforms.
Articles: Self hosted blog
I wrote an article sharing the details about my currentl blog platform. I also describe how I intend to provide a respectful blog.
Technically, this is not the simplest path, still it is really efficient. In the end there are a lot of solutions for generating static websites.
The harder part is about self-hosting it. You need to buy a domain name, and configure you DNS correctly.
This is not something tremendously hard, but don't expect to do that as easily as registering to a private service.
Code: Git Broadcast
Self hosting is not reserverd for my writing but also for the code I write on my free time projects.
All my public repositories push to both on my self-hosted Gitlab instance and GitHub. That way I host my own content, while still using to my advantages the social feature of Github.
Here is how you can configure your git repositories to push to multiple urls:
git remote set-url origin --push --add <remote-url>
git remote set-url origin --push --add <another-remote-url>Bookmarks: Espial
espial is an open-source, web-based bookmarking server. It is a very easy to install single binary. This is perfect if you want to keep a lot of bookmarks some private some publics.
Notes: Espial
Notes, are simply text you save, you can make them public or private. I tend to use it as my "micro-blogging". For the time when I just want to write a short remark and not a full blog post article.
RSS for articles, bookmarks, notes
It is important for me to provide an RSS feed. People should know when I update my blog.
I am not fully satifisfied with the state of my curren RSS feed. It does not contain my full articles content, nor an eay mean to filter by keyword or category yet.
Still this is good enough for my current usage.
espial is written in Haskell, and I made a few pull requests to add RSS feeds of my public bookmarks as well as an RSS feed for my public notes.
Syndicate Elsewhere: node-red
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.
Introduction
Our usage of the Internet changed a lot in recent years. The book Digital Minimalism5 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:
- notifications ; they are here to grab your attention when you are away doing something else.
- likes / upvotes / retweets / pokes… ; they are here to provide a "brain social sugar". They are not really useful but make us feel good by reinforing our feeling of social approval hacking our "social brain". More than that, we generally fall for most psychologic trick with those 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, they can start a discussion. They still have two problems:
- Public comment are subject to spam, troll, attacks, etc…
- Generally comments are associated to real-time notifications, and thus break a slower, calmer, more respectful communication channel. We are not all meant to react instantaneously.
My solution to take back the control, is to generate the content using my own tools and broadcast those content to all other social media. If people react to this on some social media, I'll get a mail that will be put in a "social" folder. I forbid myself to constantly check this social folder.
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. Sometime I only check the social mail folder once in a week.
As a result, I receive almost no notification. I am almost never interrupted for those social interactions.
The main drawback of course is that I can give the impression that I am rude by not answering immediately. Unfortunately I am just protecting myself.
If I feel this is a too big problem, I'll create an auto-responder bot that will nicely explain that I am sorry for the inconvenience but I can make a long time to answer.
So being on the Internet, and in particular on the Web is mostly about consuming information and producing information.
Consuming
Internet consumption evolved a lot. Just think about the few first pages you visited a few years ago and today.
People tend to consume on their smartphones and generally inside a social media platform dedicated application. You are generally presented with an inifinite scroll media content. Most of the time either video or photos. Sometime with a link to some website, often behind a paywall.
And a lot about things easy to digest. A cute cat, an image with a joke, a funny video, and once in a while like very rare, a real important information about someone you care about or a big news. Most of the time, the news will be part of a polemic. Because polemic is a very efficient attention grabber.
While I am totally fine with a bit of entertainment and polemic, the level at which we are currently exposed right now can be quite harmful.
First thing to think about, why are we so eager to news? Why not feel the same about old but great content? Before all those news system, we were active during our information consumption. We started from a search engine and searched something. Now, we still use search engines, but it is really about searching and not trying to discover something new. This is also something to keep in mind.
News
So my entry point to news consumption are:
- highly selected RSS sources (for example HN posts with > 500 upvotes)
- lobste.rs
- popular pinboard.in bookmarks
- very few sub-reddits with small volume
- laarc.io
- Fermat's Library newsletter
I plan on generating RSS from those different sources with "smart filters". Typically number of upvote filters for lobste.rs, laarc.io, sub-reddits, but also number of bookmarks in popular pinboard, etc…
I really enjoy staying inside emacs as much as I can. This is a clean, dense, text-oriented environment.
Emacs elfeed
As I said, one of my most useful tool to get news is RSS. In particular I consume it inside Spacemacs using 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.
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
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 few days to react.
Conclusion
So I described how while still using centralized social media platform, I still own my data, I protect myself from new attention grabbing features and design / UX pattern changes in those platforms.
Mostly, I take the positive aspect of those platform while not paying most of the negative price.
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 provide self-hosting for a smal community or family. But this is still reserved to technical people in my opinion.
I think we could be inspired by espia to 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
I would personally prefer that to a Federation platform (like Mastodon). Unfortunately the federated network mostly replicate the anti-features of twitter, facebook, and other social media platforms. While I believe we should change our consumption habit.
RSS is already a great tool for that.